Ruimtejournaal or SpaceNews is a serious game that fosters media literacy for children from the age of 8 to 10. In this game the player will find real time news items from Jeugdjournaal, a dutch news station that has children as their main target audience. After getting instructions of what is considered newsworthy and receiving missions the player can explore space and different themed planets in search for the right news story. It gives the children the opportunity to explore, select, create, reflect and learn about news.
Website Ruimtejournaal
A very important step during our final weeks was playtesting with our target group. For our playtesting we had 3 children from the age of 8 to 10 years old. We had playtesting at the mediaLAB. Before we went into testing, we set up a room where we had two cameras and the game ready. Of course we also had some drinks and snack for the children to make them as comfortable as possible. For the actual test we had a demo of the game ready, this meant we could through the cycle of our game. The cycle of the game is: Explore, select, create, reflect and share. We went with one child at a time in the testing room, this improved their attention and focus. During testing we had the child play the game and narrate the story and their thoughts. At various points during the test we asked what they understood of the game. The results were overal positive, they had no issue controlling the game and understanding the context of the story. Some minor issues were related to the feedback in game, for instance it was not clear what the ‘notepad’ function was. We recorded the testing so that we could view it back at a later time. After the testing we had some feedback moments and discussed the results. Overal it was very fun to do this testing and we had some realy good feedback from the kids.
On Tuesday we met up with all the stakeholders involved into the project. We had Kees, Vanessa and Manon join us for a presentation of our three concepts. The goal of this presentation was to get all the stakeholders to decide which concept we will focus on. After the meeting the final concept that was chosen, was the concept: “Outerspace News”.
On Wednesday we had a peer-pitch presentation of our final concept, where we showed our the core and visualization of our concept. We got some great insights on how we should show the news to the children; and had a brainstorm about this.
On Thursday we had a playtest with children at “Boot”, which provides after school activities and set up social connections. During the playtest we showed them the paper prototype of our concept and got valuable feedback and insights, which we will use for our concept.
This week we have been working hard in order to finish tree game prototypes. We started off with two consultations with Karel Millenaar, here we received a lot of feedback and criticism about our existing concepts.
The next days we worked on this and improved the core of the concepts and gotten everything straight.
After this we presented our three concepts shortly to our project partner CineKid and received feedback from them too.
Here are the sketches of our concepts
Outer Space News:
Storybox:
Photo Reporter:
At the start of next week we will select one concept together with out project partner and stakeholder. This concept will be worked out and developed into a working prototype.
This week started with a peer presentation of the concepts we created the week before and we received good feedback from the other groups. It was useful for us to see how others react to the concepts and how can we make them better. The day after this we had a quick meeting with Frank Kloos, lecturer at CMD, to discuss our concepts and how should be the best approach to prototype them. The biggest advice was for us to be build a prototype that communicates the concepts idea, without actually getting into the design of it.
We also participated at the Games for Health Conference. There we saw several different talks that were very inspiring for our project. David Martz from MuzzyLane gave a talk about “When you’re Ready to Make a Serious Game” that was really useful for us to understand the process of making a serious games and what are the best practices and most common mistakes. Here are some pictures of the event:
On Wednesday we had a workshop entitled “High Impact Innovation Experience (HI²T)” by Gideon Bazen and Fenny Lücker. It was interesting to see our project in a more business model context and to approach it in a creative problem solving perspective.
The day after that we made a field trip to iFabrica and saw some really incredible machines. They can work with all different materials, from wood to thick iron plates and some 3D printing as well.
This week was about drawing scenarios and actual gameplay elements. From the Cinekid festival we got some great input for our concepts. During this phase it was important to make more scenario’s of actual gameplay elements and user stories.
This is an example of a scenario draw out:
This scenerio starts with basic gameplay of having several planets which the player can choose from. The player then chooses a planet and collects the news that is on that planet. after collecting all the news, he or she can then make a newsbroadcast.
During this awesome 7th week we received feedback on our first draft of the research paper. Some parts needed more information so we received one more week to finish it.
Wednesday we received a workshop from Charlie to generate concepts from different perspectives for our projects.
The Cinekid festival started this week. We went there on Friday to look around and to interview children. When we got there we received badges and a tour around their medialab. We saw a lot of children having fun by playing on the interactive installation that were at the festival.
Gijs also had a lot of fun playing there.
There were a lot of people on the festival having a good time.
We managed to interview almost 20 people there including a focus group. The interviewed children were boys and girls in the age of 8 to 10.
We started this week giving our Peer Presentation of the ongoing project research. We got some really good feedback from all the other teams and some experts that were also present. This was essential for us to get on the right track. It’s possible to see a preview of the presentation file right here.
On the day after we had a meeting with our project manager and got some guidance to continue the research in a SMART way. We made a commitment to make some user and experts interviews to gain insights for the conclusions of the research. These next pictures show precisely the outcome of this meeting:
After this we worked on questionnaires for children to understand their motivations, behaviours, frustrations and goals. On total 4 interviews were made, one of them can be considered a in depth interview, since one of the team members already new this 8-year old boy since he was 2. This particular interview can be seen on the next pictures:
The knowledge we acquired after these interviews and some previous desk research was used to create personas that can represent our target group. Here are four different personas, each representing one end of our range groups (boy and girl with 8 and 10 years old):
We also arranged some interviews with experts in media literacy, game theory and in children.
During this week, we discussed as a team to get our conclusions together and have some valuable insights for creating the first draft of the Research Report. We delivered this document on Friday (11 Oct) and still need feedback from our project manager and stakeholders to refine the document and proceed with everything clear for the Concept Phase. You can preview the document next or see it full here.
So this week started of weak, one of our teammember got sick over the weekend so he couldn’t come on monday and tuesday. The other remaining team members did great work working along on the documents. This week was all about research but we still got to do a fun workshop.
The workshop we had was done by Gabriele Colombo who gave us a lesson in Photoshop basics and gave us a nice assignment of making a panorama image.
Here is the finished image of all 13 different images we made.
We also played around with SUGRU and made this custom pen grip. We also drank some really bad cheap beer ( AFTER WORK ) and visited our daily grocery store for some fresh salads!
In the second week of the Research Phase we were able to finalize our research questions. Our coach returned from Japan and gave us some good feedback on our current questions. With his feedback we were able to analyze and change them accordingly. How research question is “How can Serious Games foster media literacy for kids?”. We divided the research in three main subjects: Kids, media literacy and serious games. Jay would lead the research on Kids, Sandro on media literacy and Kuba on serious games.
Due to the absence of Marco we did not have a workshop on Wednesday morning and had more time to do desk research. Next to this we also individually discuss our learning goals with our coach.
At the end of the week we had a meeting with the creator of Kijkradio concept and discussed our current version of the design brief with her.
