Disaster Diversion — Saving the World with Unit Conversions

Designing games is difficult. Designing educational games to teach unit conversions is even more so. But we — Yanyan, Jia, and I — took a stab at it anyway.

Statement

We want to design a game to teach unit conversion for college students that will include both narrative and challenge as types of fun. It will teach common unit conversions for volume, weight, and area; and we will measure this by the time spent per pair and the number of points they receive at the end.

Yanyan, Jia, and I wanted to make this game because mistakes in unit conversions are common, yet they are used often for Physics, Chemistry, and in the real world. Units used the US are also different from the International system, adding to the necessity of mastering unit conversion.

Games like this are historically boring. We hope it isn’t that way.

The Story

You manage a disaster-diversion team. However, the government only has enough funding to fund one disaster-diversion team, and there’s another team that is competing with you! You must solve more disasters than your opponent to prove yourself worthy…

So save the world, or disappear… capitalism, amirite?

Unfortunately, we don’t think the story ties in with the game very well. Regardless, here are the printables:

In the PDF

For the TL;DR, this is our game! In the PDF, you can expect to be able to print all the cards, the board, and the rules to play the game:

Disaster-Diversion Printables

As with any design challenge, we iterated and tested many times to get here. First, we had a Monopoly-like game:

Monopoly-like board, too!

• A multiplayer game where players’ chits start in the lower right square
• Roll dice & Move
• Must solve an unit conversion problem (with number decided by rolling dice) to be able to collect resources at each square
• First player who collects a specific set of resources wins

Then, we modified and redesigned it to be quicker, less overwhelming, and less arbitrary chance:

Sets of Cure, Formula, and Resource cards.

• Two-player Cards Matching Game
• Mechanics is similar to Flux where player start with drawing one, putting cards on the table like Keeper cards in Flux, and trying to spot a matching collection of a cure card, a formula, card and a resource card
• Players collect points for every matching collection found
• The player who earns the most points at the end wins

And this was one of the feedback we got, based on Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “Flow,” that summarized our prototype at the point pretty well:

The players were never actually in the flow of the game. Making fun educational games is really difficult.

After many (7) more iterations, we finally end up here:

Our completed game, printed out. Some edges are cut off, because printers do not like me.

And that’s our game!

Summary

• Given a particular learning subject, certain mechanics work very well while others may not be ideal. For example, we tried to apply mechanics in Monopoly on unit conversions but found the game frustrating as there were no easy and natural way to fit in all the numbers and formulas.
• While the mechanics themselves could bring lots of fun to an educational game, an intriguing story is also needed to motivate the players, especially after they find out that the purpose of the game is learning. I don’t think we achieved this, and this would be an area of improvement.
• Measuring the learning outcomes can hardly be done without some form of tests.

Post-creation thoughts

Unfortunately, I personally think that our game is not where it needs to be to truly make the experience fun and enticing. Still, we learned a lot and will continue to apply what we learned to create amazing experiences for our players.