The power of play: Building skills through play
This article is part 2 of 3 in explaining the design process of developing a kid’s digital play experience.
Working on real life projects is always a unique challenge. This article is about what the possible future of digital play would look like. My team was inspired by the Future Play Design Challenge by Lego ventures and decided to take a deep dive into brainstorming ideas for the future. On exploring the current gaming market and trends we realized having many options is always a good option. You may wonder what that means…..so moving ahead to understand our process and our ideas.
If you read our part 1 of 3 article then you might remember our goal for this project, it was to create a kid friendly and parent approved game, but not just a game we are moving forward to create an experience. We started this process of idea generation by a brainstorming workshop.
We had 3 people on our team and each of us had to run one brainstorming session. The brainstorm session was based on our hmw statements that we came up with after our primary and secondary research.
HMWs:
- How might we design a game that prevents a child from developing an unhealthy addiction but still allows her to build social skills?
- How might we create a safe digital play and learn experience for kids and their parents that help them build skills and learn through experience?
- How might we craft digital play via new media & technology to boost children’s curiosity & creativity?
Ideas
Here is how our brainstorming session looked like, we had 4 other participants who had entirely new perspectives about this opportunity space and which lead to many ideas. Like I said before why having many ideas is a good idea. This session helped us in generating concepts which we had not discussed before as a team.
So as you can see we found many options here, but going ahead with all these is not easy to achieve in such a short time. Yet trying out things is the only way to actually understand what the best solution is. And even before prototyping it’s more important to look at the major themes and patterns throughout the exercise. One major theme that we found through this process was how futuristic the digital world can be. Moreover technological advancements have no limit, it’s constantly evolving and that’s the reason people come up with crazy ideas that will someday be possible to achieve.
Our next step according to this theme of how AR/VR can help creating game experiences was to look into designing activities and roles that would help children learn more skills and learn from experiences. We had to keep in mind a few things as we were moving ahead…
- Help kids build social skills
- Parents involved during playtime
- Learn more about real life challenges
- Not just play but create experience
- Help kids build critical thinking and imagination skills
Concept Options
Based on our many different ideas and narrowing the scope of what are the main points we will be focusing on further we grabbed some ideas from the brainstorming and came up with three game concepts
- Create your own play world while answering prompts
A game application that allows users to create their own play world by using points to buy stuff for their room. Points can be earned by answering questions and tasks (about real life) The prompts to earn points will be based on real-life questions and enacting scenes. This will be a city of kids with their own playrooms. Users will have to maintain a daily streak, they can only earn one streak a day and need to come back the next day to level up so that they don’t get too addicted for long hours.
2. Sensor based video game projected on the wall
A video game that projects on the wall and is interactive. You can move characters and collect objects in order to level up, but you are now the cursor and need to move around the “screen” (wall) to make objects move. The projection can be made bigger or smaller depending on the height of the participants.
3. IOT blocks and figures built in with sensors to reenact stories
Imagine blocks or figurines that are connected to an ipad app. As you move them, the app can narrate a story based on the position of the blocks in relation to each other. It could also be connected to a smart speaker, or with another friend who has the app, and they can talk through the app as they play with the interactive toys.
Prototyping
This was definitely the trickiest part of our project, the main reason was because we were doing this remotely and had to think more about how we will test our prototype and then enter the prototyping phase. As you see here we had three ideas, the most feasible we found was the first idea of showing these multiple screens and testing it with our users. We started building our prototype using figma to show different world building options and various prompts that will help kids learn critical thinking skills and social interaction with peers. Getting more into the first idea we divided it into two parts,
- Prompts
Here’s how we added a variety of prompts. Broadly describing the categories of these prompts were questions that would help start conversations between friends and family, prompts that would help building critical thinking skills, and those that would keep them engaged but add on to their development.
- World building
The thought behind the world builder game was to help kids learn real life skills of how things work. We added a few options of environments that kids visit or know from the movies, and added tools around how this will shape together step by step into the game. During the start of this game kids will have to select roles that they would take upon in building the environment. For example if a kid wants to build a zoo, there will be options that say zoologist, architect, landscaper, the kid can select one of these and continue to know more about what work he needs to perform.
User Testing
After we were done prototyping these two ideas, the next step was to hand it over to kids and learn how they feel about it, learn their pain points and get to know more about what can be addressed or improved better. We recruited users through our contacts and met them over zoom to get some feedback. Here are some major quotes,
“It’s good for kids that are interested in making something like this in real life because it teaches them how to do it”
“Good to learn how to work on a team”
“Give them a chance to choose wrong and see what happens”
“Be more immersed in zoo environment”
“Good engaging activity, concentration and creative building”
“Prompts need to change depending on the age groups”
From this feedback we learnt that kids loved the world building idea more where they had to build more stuff and not just answer questions or the prompt activities. But we still wanted to have some parts of questions that might help kids learn how to tackle challenges or answer questions that come up in real life. After our brainstorming around the feedback we came up with a more advanced plan how can we incorporate prompts into the world they are building in the world builder game.
Still curious? I think you should be, because this does not end here, head on to our part 3 to know more about how it went ahead to being a new brand.
