Background:
Expectation: Create a language learning game suitable for young children ages 8+.
Duration: ~5 months
Team Size: 4
Organization Partner: Foreign Language for Youth (or FLY)
Roles:
- Project manager
- User experience designer
- Game flow designer
- Lesson creator
Programs Used:
- Figma
- Unity
Game Components:
There are the 3 main rooms for the game: cat selection room, classroom and the test room.
For the playable Unity version, I decided that the team should focus on the Test Room feature because that was the most interactable portion of the game.
Cat Selection Room:
This is the first room that students will see when they enter the game. Here is where they will be able to select a cat and a lesson to work with. Once a cat is selected their cat card will pop up, and that is where students will see the cat’s description, as well as the lessons they need to learn and have mastered. All the unlocked lessons students are able to interact with again (regardless of mastery or not).
Classroom:
Here is where students will learn their chosen lessons. The chosen teacher will show inside the room and start to teach the lesson for the day. Level one lessons are written, but the structure is not built into Unity yet.
Test Room:
This room will be where students prove their mastery of the lesson, or show that they have learned/ memorized materials. Inside this room will be the “master cat”. The master cat can be customized to look however the student likes, and will award students prizes for working with it/ proving their mastery of lessons.
Game Flow
Final Project:
Next Steps:
These are the things I’d like to do to develop the game further:
Overall System:
- Build student profiles so that they can log in and keep track of progress
- Create teacher profiles so they can see the scores and time spent in the game
Classroom:
- Build the code of this room
- Implement a text to speech/ speech to text feature
- Find ways to make this feature more interactive
Test Room:
- Have animations to go along with the correct/ incorrect answer
- Build test questions and answers to the other lesson plans
Takeaways:
- That there can be a disconnect of the feel of a prototype and the built version of the game, and problem solving to fix the disconnect.
- How to prioritize features so that we are able to develop a deliverable.
- How to navigate and explain process between different teams/ stakeholders.