Picking apart a Key Stage 1 game

We took a look at a shape learning game on the BBC Bitesize website today. We looked at it in terms of interaction, goals, struggle, structure, endogenous meaning and then evaluated the game overall.

We found that the interaction in the game was extremely limited, you chose from three possible shapes but whether you chose correctly or incorrectly, the game state did not change, it either moved to the next question if you were right or reset the question if your were wrong. the other thing that was discussed was that there wasn't any feedback for the player. By this I mean that if the questions were answered wrong, the game didn't explain why you were wrong, which could lead to the game just becoming a guessing game or an exercise in trial and error.

The game had one clear goal, which was to help build a robot, whereas to me this is not a very meaningful or motivational goal, I can see that it would appeal to the target audience of the game (KS1 students) and therefore is a good goal for this game.

In terms of struggle this game fail miserably. In only giving the player a multiple choice question, with no consequences if your answer is incorrect, there is no incentive to really think about the answer, the player may just guess until they get it right, essentially learning nothing and  bypassing the whole point of the game entirely.

The structure has a similar problem, by which I mean that the only guidance given is you have to choose one of three options, two of which will be a wrong answer and give an animation of a character getting electrocuted/blown up. The problem I see with this is that the target audience may find this animation amusing and therefore may intentionally get the wrong answer to see this happen again and again.

For the target audience there is endogenous meaning in this game, the goal of building the robot may be important to children of that age as they want to see what it looks like when finished and are also taught that helping people is good.

For an evaluation i think that this is not a terrible game but it fails in a few key areas as I have stated about. I just get the overall feeling that whoever designed this either ran out of time/money or just got to this point and thought 'meh, that that'll do' which I personally feel no game designer should ever think.

(proof reads this article back.......meh, that'll do)