Speed Dating & More
From our speed dating presentation we learned a lot about what everyone else was doing for the learning experience and got some very helpful feedback. We found that the “Interaction with Others” was also considering doing a board game with 3D interactive pieces. They showed 3 different ideas for board games with different ways of interacting with different part/game components. I think we are on our way to fleshing out our game, but I think that it is important for us to not become so attached to one idea, for our experience/game. We have thought of other ideas, but none of those ideas have reached the same level of refinement as the idea we’ve been tackling for the past few weeks. Thinking outside of our idea might help us to resolve some of the issues that came up from speed dating.
People generally seemed to like the idea of our experience and that we would be using a physical board and cards along with a chatbot to guide them through the complicated tasks. Some people didn’t know what CLA was or couldn’t remember what it was so it was suggested that throughout the CLA section of our experience, we have the chatbot explain the different layers of it. People were also confused by the portion of the experience where participants would resolve stakeholder conflicts in regards to their individual requirements for a successful design intervention. When we met after speed dating, we decided to eliminate that step because it didn’t feel necessary to the overall experience and we felt that participants may wonder why they needed to do that to progress further in the game/experience.
We took Stacie’s advice and started making basic visualizations of our board and what would appear on the screen with the chatbot in order to get a clearer picture of what aspects/steps of our game are digital or physical. We chose to get rid of the giant 3D iceberg that was going to be part of our board since it was confusing and would make it hard for participants to see post it notes or cards on the board.
We made 4 different basic iterations of the board before deciding on the one above. We thought that if we mapped the experience of the game along a path that they might be able to see how the steps lead to the end goal. We decided that the end iterations steps on the path would be puzzle pieces so that players can decide how many rounds of iteration that they do.
Our plan moving forward is to flesh out more than just the CLA portion of our game. We felt that the CLA part of our game wasn’t the most interesting part of our game. Although it is helpful for learning systems thinking concepts, it isn’t as engaging as other parts of the game. There are successful games that take a while to set up or to progress in. Our concern is mainly figuring out what is essential for systems thinking and how we can convey that these steps are essential and allow participants to progress further in the game.
