Hungry Minds
An appetite for learning
Why hello there! You have arrived to this article as you have an insatiable hunger to read and understand to what peoples thoughts are on various subject matters. Some of you are avid fans of mine. Many of my case studies don’t really approach the traditional ‘scientific’ method of research findings. Traditional methods of research papers can be well, sleep inducing.
With that being said, let us dive into the topic at hand. This client project was about designing a children learning app for mobile devices. I must say that this particular case study was one of my favourites as user testing from our research really gave us solid evidence of the best learning practices we can give to our children.
A child’s education and learning is one of the cornerstones of humanity. How we teach our children though is often varied. Different nations have their own approach and methodology for best educational practices. Now, I would love list educational rankings for countries, but after sifting through countless NGO’s and UN results, I decided to withhold it. Suffice to say, countries with high literacy rates for children offer their own best methods of practice.
Started out as a Boardgame
Working as an ESL Instructor, Kevin Munn has spent several years not only as an overseas educator, but also as a social worker for young children in Toronto. His world travels plus helping the local Canadian youth, led him to develop a board-game by the title of Hungry Minds. The game contains 3 sets of card based activities utilizing 3 educational learning tools (Flash Card, Memory and Category)
Kevin has a strong desire to develop his game onto a mobile platform. The board-game itself is based on ‘Best Practices ’ used by learning centres. His goal is to have the game be applicable to different educational settings. To be used by teachers and parents alike, but primarily to focus in on Parents. The content would be easily accessible and serve as an alternative learning tool, paired with the more traditional tools that we use for our children. Also and most importantly the game has to be fun.
Team up for the Challenge and Opportunity
To date, his learning game has been met with positive feedback by those who have utilize it. However, he is acutely aware that his game has the potential to be a better hit on the digital front. This is where my team and I came into the picture.
As we sat with Kevin, we discussed the topic at hand. We understood that as of 2019, parents heavily rely on schools to give their offsprings the best skills and learning practices. Parents would only supplement their children's learning by assisting them on their homework or setting them up with extracurricular activities. Well that is if they have the time.
An average person today is juggling multiple things at once in order to live a comfortable life. Being a parent with children, juggling activities becomes even more precarious. Society always wants whats best for the next generation but there are a lot factors to face. So here lies the challenge and the opportunity that my team strives for.
The Challenge was to overcome the lack of time for parents to support their child with their school work. Also while educational tabletop games engage students, they are costly, cumbersome and time consuming to learn.
We as a team have had experiences with parents and children alike so we decidedly knew that we had create a learning based game app for children targeted to JK to Grade Five. The game itself would help to encourage independent studying in a more playful environment. The added opportunity would be for parents to add in their own ‘learning homework’ for their children to enhance variety.
Questions and Answers
As we deployed surveys and interview questions, and Isabelle and Viktorija travelled to a french immersion school. They graciously allowed my team mates to conduct an observational interview to see how junior kindergartens played with one of the Hungry Minds games, ‘Ocean Chase’.
Set up as flash cards, be it single or multiplayer, children have to correctly answer an image before allowing them to proceed forward. If you answered incorrectly, you would have to remain where you are until you answer the next question. The players themselves take on colourful fish that are trying to outrun a whale that’s trying to swallow them up.
The observational interview proved very useful as both of them were able to see first hand of collected data. Also two key survey findings showed the following information.
Its very telling and data confirming that 63% of children preferred learning through a combination of Visual, Auditory and Tactile. This paralleled to the observational data as kids were engrossed with the sound effects made by the teachers and being allowed to move their colourful fish to beat the whale. Most importantly they had no problems in terms of understanding the game after a brief introduction. 50% of parents use a similar strategy when searching for a learning app that help them at home. Something thats easy to understand for both parent and child alike but importantly teach best learning skills. Now all we had to do is a quick C&C analysis to see where Hungry Minds stood next to its potential competitors.
From the two bench markers between learning focused and feature engagement, Hungry Minds slotted right in the middle. Prodigy is a highly regarded learning app game and many folks praise its skill learning capabilities. Sago Mini on the other hand, though visually pleasing, was absolutely mind numbing. Seriously, whats the point of feeding your characters mountains of ice cream with no end in sight? You’re simply training your child to the art of torture.
Lets play as Personas
Now as usual, Personas give a perspective of the users that would potentially be utilizing the app. These personas were derived from the data we collected and further clustered in an affinity diagram to better extrapolate three personas. Two being Primary Personas and the third being Secondary. If I’ve never mentioned that there can be multiple of personas then allow me to give you a quick snippet. Depending on what a product caters towards, there can be several distinct aspects to different user personas. They can be independent to one another or connected. The end journeys for the persona is how they utilize a particular product. In this case We have two Primary personas and one Secondary.
The two primary persona represent the Mother and Child. As a mother Rose wants to help her son engage more independently with his learning abilities. Her daily schedule gives her very little time to monitor his progress but still wants to identify any potential struggles he faces with his learning comprehension and assist from there. Also, she wants her son to have genuine interest and not have the game seem like a chore to do.
For David, he wants some an indicator, a vocal guidance that helps him along the game he wants to play. He also loves to get rewarded by his actions when certain tasks are completed based on his learning comprehension.
We then have the Teacher , Marie-Ève. As the secondary persona, she wants all her students to be successful at their learning skills. She will find the best tools that not only allows the child to overcome learning hurdles but in a a manner that doesn’t make the child feel like they are falling behind. It would also be a tool that she would be able to recommend to the child’s caregiver. The secondary persona helps to support the two main personas in the line of thought to what is required for the app design.
Give Chase
With all the information that we were able to nail down, the time came to draft out the game itself. Let me tell you that developing a game, no less a learning game is quite a feat to tackle. Given the timeframe, with only two weeks to spare, we made some executive decisions. For one thing, there was no way we could design all three games. Instead we would focused in on the most popular game, ‘Ocean Chase’. We also took care of the site navigation as we had to be conscious that there would be two users, who operate the app. One would be the persona, the mother (Rose) and the other would her child (David). As the caregiver, she would have control over all the parental aspects of the learning app. She would have access to her son’s profile, learning progress, and the option to input her own questions. The child himself would only concern himself with the game play, his ‘reward progress’, all the while following a narrator.
The wonderful doodles show you how we started to lay out a more 2D driven scheme instead of 3D. You can also notice the visual narrator that would assist David throughout his game play. I especially advocated for having narrators as it would be difficult for David to figure out by just having a voice alone. Olly the Octopus was thus created to assist David on his adventures in Ocean Chase. Fun fact, the reason why an Octopus was selected as the narrator for Ocean Chase is that Octopi as species are considered highly intelligent based on their cognitive learning skills.
Is that Australia?
Remember how I mentioned in the last project that we used Figma to wireframe and prototype the mid fidelity? No? Well I mentioned that Figma has a great collaborative capabilities. The only thing that Figma doesn’t have were the advance animation features that Adobe XD were able to sustain. On top of that, XD also introduced its beta collaborative features, effectively making it a titan of wire-framing.
XD collaborative does has its’ bugs, but it proved itself by giving us ability to add voice features and animate screens. But before that lets show what we did for creating Mid Fidelities.
Yes that is Australia in the back and everything seems so, green. To be fair I am the one who takes responsibility as we needed place holders for the UI team to understand the layouts. As for the green screens, I wanted my team to see the exact areas we could play with. We did execute some minor changes thought. We cleared up the navigation bar and opted for only three navigation icons instead. The brain (represents the main menu) would employ a drop down menu system and serves as the access point for the caregiver. They would have have access to a kids progress report and also have the ability to formulate questions. The child would only have to worry about gameplay and the treasure box would represent his accomplishments. And yes Australia was swapped out for something a little more generic.
Bubbly and Bright
Once we got the prototyping tested and complete, it was time for our little fishy to swim on over to the UI team. Kim McKinnon and Sara Teso did fantastic work on coming up with a bright colour palette with friendly upbeat fonts suitable for learning game app. As a result, the game is modern and still whimsy at the same time.
Isn’t it marvellous! I was super happy and stoked to see a new fresh reiteration of Hungry Minds. Even if we did only stick to one game; the possibilities of what the other games could look like can stretch as far as the imagination would deem so. We did, however, still displayed three character narrators, to simulate the other islands that the child can unlock. The game had a very dark mode feel but with base hex colour being #0C0C64 for the background, fonts and ctas colour schemes stood out more. They also eliminated the candy cloud that enveloped the questions, instead replacing it with large bubbles.
Above is the animation of the little fish munching on a starfish as the whale comes ever closer. What you can’t hear is Olly narrating on the screen, but I promise it sounds cool. Now if only I had time to insert my voice in to make it more cartoon-like. I would have nailed it.
Moment of Truth
So we imagined David, in a hypothetical scenario, would use this app given to him by his mother. But to really ensure that we had an app that children would actually utilized, we tested it on a live subject. As much as we were confident, children are notoriously fickle. They could be in any number of moods, happiness to total meltdown moments later. I should know, as an Uncle I am defacto babysitter (after my parents) to look after my niece and nephew. They are my wee ones, but sometimes I ponder if I will ever have kids. Kudos to the parents on handling their meltdowns. Regardless of the unknown reactions, we needed to validate the fruits of our labor. Off we went to conduct a test with a parent and child.
AFTERMATH
The feedback from the child testing was more than satisfactory, it was a success. The child was very attentive, even with the sugar rush of M&M. He eagerly motioned his hands, mimicking movements. he answered questions correctly when the Narrator queried him. There was happiness when the fish swam. His hands tapped everywhere that could be tapped, wanting to see more and to answer more questions. Another thing which also provided proof to our data. His parents were occupied with their own activity while the child only focused in on the learning game. It was one of the primary opportunities we wanted to cross off. We wanted the child to feel encouraged by independent studying in a more playful environment. The only missed opportunity was we weren’t able to include in a separate space for parents to input their own questions. We had the frames but nothing that tied into the demo.
Regardless, we as a team were beyond happy with the results. The information and results we presented to Kevin further drove his ambition to get his game developed. In fact, he felt that Red’s App team would able to take over and flesh out the model. Sadly though, the App team doesn’t have at the present moment people who are in gaming development. Gaming devs are sought after and often have a lot tasks to ensure they are able to code each and every single aspect of animation. I did manage to find someone who is interested and as far as I know, they are talking to one another.
Final Thoughts
This was a very satisfying project. Some projects are easy to assess, others like this one are a little more tricky because the nature of unpredictably with children. Believe me, as a child, I be content playing with boxes, even if there was a tent right next to me. Because a child’s imagination is ever boundless, and sometimes things that we make, may not be the correct thing after all. At least my team did succeed in something that a child would be able to use. Not only to use, but to learn.
I bid you all farewell. Till my next case study which will be the finale of my epic six month journey at Red Academy.
