Author: sheyesha

1. Usability does not mean that everyone and anyone can use the system, instead it means that it is customized for maximum usage by the target user group. The design process is user-centered and the highly iterative, requiring communication throughout development between users and the parties involved in the design process (Issa & Isaias, 2015). Observation is a key part of the designers’ process to configure the system to the users’ immediate and future needs. All user input is valuable because interactions do not stop with production because the system is designed to interact with the user so the system can learn and make customization suggestions for a better quality experience. Quality of experience is measured by whether the system fits the environmental and organizational needs of the users and can be used efficiently and safely (Issa & Isaias, 2015).

2. From an elementary school perspective, educational usability criteria should address the following questions: Is it easy to customize and switch between different age/user groups? Does it have different levels/types of motivation and gamification functions that can be customized for different age groups. Does it have different modes of communication? Can it measure academic progress and give alerts for students at-risk?

Elementary school often includes K-6 students, so if families have multiple children, this is the school period where siblings will attend at the same time and share devices. The app would also have to be accessible to parents and teachers. For the same educational apps to be used throughout grade levels, the technology would have to have different difficulty and motivation modes that grow with the child. There should be different modes of communication to accommodate emerging readers and people who prefer verbal communication. Student progress needs to be measured so teachers or the technology can provide differentiation and interventions when necessary.

3. Woolgar (1990) described that company interactions were framed within outsider/insider terminology. This is an example of how companies (insiders) configure tools from their perspective, thus requiring users to adjust to the tool rather than configure the tool to their own preferences. Of interest is how the goals for each team/department differed. For example, the Marketing team’s goal is to create interest in the product, so they wanted to attract a large group of prospective buyers. To make the tool appeal to a vast range of user groups the tools had to be configured for a large demographic group, which could lead to grouping 5-year-old users with adult users.

Woolgar (1990) states that no matter the intention and despite options for users to configure tools, designers are ultimately configuring their users to their product because the designers are creating a tool that will be used for a certain purpose and they expect their users to use the tool in a specific way. As an educator, this shows how our choices affect our students’ thought processes. The content we choose, the situation we present it in and the learning tasks we engage our students in, all configure how they (at least) view the next portion of their learning journey until the next teacher has a chance to tinker with the students’ configuration specifics.

References

1. Text – ‘Explorers and Adventurers: Exploring the World’ is a 88-page curriculum guide from the International Primary Curriculum (IPC). IPC is a cross-curricular program “developed informed, globally competent, and future-ready learners” (Fieldwork Education, 2022). I chose their curriculum guide on this unit because my school uses IPC, it is my first year using this curriculum and as someone born and raised in Canada, I am curious how a British-designed program would approach the treatment of Indigenous people. This text is used by teachers to plan the unit, providing learning objectives, links to learning resources, guiding questions and suggested projects/activities. Although IPC is created in the UK and primarily used in the UK or English National Curriculum-based schools, the teachers implementing IPC objectives can be from all over the world, and would thus have different backgrounds and experiences regarding Indigeneity. The common thread guiding these teachers would be the curriculum guide. The impact of the explorers is mostly addressed in this IPC unit during Year 3 (Grade 2), which could be an indicator or an affecting agent on the prominence this part of history has on courses taken by pre-service teachers.
2. Question: IPC always has a set of International learning goals for each year group. In ‘Explorers and Adventurers’, the International learning goals emphasized is: to “be able to research commonalities between different places and cultures” (Fieldwork Education, 2020, p. 13). How does the curriculum use this learning objective to create a deeper understanding and appreciation for Indigenous people and their culture among students and teachers?
3. Search terms used were:
   1. Indian
   2. Indigenous
   3. Aboriginal
   4. First Nations
   5. Native

Results: The learning objective is covered in 2 lessons out of a 6-week unit. Can a greater appreciation for Indigenous peoples’ cultures grow out of 2 lessons from a potential 30 lessons? The first lesson is an investigation of the positive and negative effects of exploration, where students research the advantages and disadvantages of exploring for their home countries or the host country. Students are asked to summarize their research by stating whether exploration has had “a largely positive or negative outcome for the world” (Fieldwork Education, 2020, p. 69). The second lesson focuses on female explorers and the rules that different cultures have for women.

4. New Question: Looking at the title of this unit, ‘Explorers and Adventurers: Exploring the World’, the unit brings to mind the glory and bravery often depicted in adventure stories. How does the curriculum balance the representation of the voices of the Indigenous people and explorers/adventurers?

5. New search term 1: I think explorer should be added because it can be used to frame how Indigenous people are viewed. Within the text there is a glossary that defines explorers as   “someone who travels to places where no one has ever been in order to find out what Is
there” (Fieldwork Education, 2020, p. 80). At the beginning of the unit, the text suggests that explorers can be defined to the students as:

1. 1. people who want to extend our knowledge of the world around us
   2. a type of geographer
   3. people from the past that found new places (Fieldwork Education, 2020, p. 16).

New search term 2: adventurer should be added for the same reasons as explorer. The text-provided glossary defines adventurers as “someone who enjoys and looks for dangerous and exciting experiences” (Fieldwork Education, 2020, p. 80). It is suggested that teachers give the following explanations to students:

1. 1. Adventurers are thrill seekers who take risks
   2. Adventurers do things no one has done before (Fieldwork Education, 2020, p. 16)

Not including the title page and page headers, the term explorer was used 269 times and adventurer was used 44 times throughout the document.  

6.  Results: As indicated by the title and the number of times explorer and adventurer appeared is far more than all the five original search terms combined. It does not seem like the curriculum designers created this document with a balance of representation in mind.

Limitations of my searches: resources were linked to the terms, I skimmed the resource. Some of the video resources I was unable to access because they are only made available to British IP address holders, and the VPN I used is routed through Hong Kong.

Having said this, there were no resources suggested in the lesson about the impact of exploration. While there are more resources written from point of view of Indigenous peoples, it is still greatly outnumbered by the existing records and literature by Europeans. In the lesson about female explorers, the following explorers/adventurers to discuss were suggested: Dutch explorer Alexine Tinne, Englishwoman Mary Kingsley, American explorer Mary French Sheldon, British skipper Belinda Kirk, British kayaker Sarah Outen, the Afghan women’s cycling team and American Amelia Earhart. The goal of the lesson was to study contemporary women, but the lesson could have been extended or another lesson added to include women such as Sacagawea so students could learn that Indigenous women had an impact on history despite the restrictions placed on women during that time.

References

Fieldwork Education. (2020). Explorers and Adventurers: Exploring the World (2021-2027). Fieldwork Education Limited. https://fieldworkeducation.com/curriculums/primary-years

First Nations and Indigenous Studies: The University of British Columbia. (2009). Terminology. Indigenous Foundations. https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/terminology/

The pink screen of death became a familiar sight around the end of March. How did I end up here? I’ve made games on Scratch with my Grade 3s, but nothing like this, so what made me take this leap? 

Brainstorm and Concept Development

While I found my own ideas uninspired, the members of my group had intriguing ideas, especially Ryan’s music idea. This was probably the part of the game design process I enjoyed the most. The initial list of ideas from Assignment 1 looked like this:

Due to time zone differences and schedules, this was done at 1am. After the group meeting I decided to take advantage of my caffeine-fueled alertness and catch up with family members and friends living on Canada’s beautiful west coast. I don’t usually get homesick, but while I was looking over Assignment 1 after my calls, I kept imagining summer vacation and all the places I usually visit when I go home, and that is how the bass player became a beach busker/surfer. This part of the process reminded me how important it is to be open-minded and a lifelong learner. If we lose interest in the world around us, ideas stagnate. I shared my ideas with the group and they added more details and structure which formed the proposal in the next step. I appreciate the collaborative nature of designing video games. I highly doubt that I would have been able to imagine and develop an idea like this if I had been working by myself. If I had done this by myself, the game most likely would have involved pizzas and fractions, an overdone concept in elementary mathematics classes.

Creating Game Assets

Putting the game together was a series of learning processes. To make the music notes, GarageBand was used. It was my first time using the app and while the music I created was not used, it did lead to me planning a cross-curricular project on poetry and music to be used later on with my Grade 3s. The next process was creating sprites and animations for the game. Using YouTube tutorials I was able to create some basic assets for the game. Piksel was used to create the assets, which turned out to be fairly straightforward. What was a bit difficult was picturing how they would be used. Ryan shared videos of how far he had gotten in the coding process so it became easier for me to see how the animations could be used and what other animations might be needed. At this point the game had been simplified from the original proposal, so the number of assets needed had decreased.

Coding

I thought the natural next step would be to help out with the coding. Ryan shared his codes as a .json file so that codes could be added to the game. When I opened up the file in GDevelop, I was greeted by the pink screen of death. Looking at the side bar, most of the images were not appearing, so I tried putting all the assets into a folder with the .json file and reloaded it. Nothing happened so I then manually reuploaded each asset. When I was done, the music and the character didn’t move!

I rewatched YouTube tutorials on GDevelop and played around with the codes. I managed to get the character to move, but now the sound was on a repeated loop. Tweaking with the codes, I was able to stop the loop, but now there was no music, so the same problem as before.

From here I decided that perhaps I was trying to take on too much. I decided to focus on adding coins and a points counter to the game because they’re basic parts of most platform games and I thought it would be easy–ha! Following the tutorial I found online, I added coins and I was able to get them to disappear on contact. That was thrilling. I added a counter and set it to increase by 1 for each coin collected. I coded it so that a “1” was added each time a coin was collected, so the score progressions was 1, 11, 111, 1111, 11111. I watched the tutorial again and tried again. Same result. I tried following another tutorial and this time the counter began to function like a stopwatch with no pause button. Eventually I tweaked so much that the character stopped moving. Because I did not save before I made each change, I had to figure out what I had done to fix it. I could not determine what needed to be fixed and by then I was feeling frustrated. I took a screenshot of what I had created and tossed it.

RIP

Final Reflections

I think there are no shortcuts in coding. If I could go back in time, I would start from scratch and create the game from the beginning rather than try adding codes to an existing game. Perhaps adding codes would work for seasoned coders, but for a beginner like me, it feels like a wiser choice to start and learn from the beginning.

I thoroughly enjoyed the writing portion of game design and I would like to explore how I can utilize this skill. Perhaps I should have focused on adding text to the game.

Looking back on the game design process, I am reminded of Seth Meyer’s interviews with his SNL alumni. During these interviews, Seth and his guests speak of their favourite sketches and sketches that never made it onto the show.  There’s nothing wrong with culling ideas, but it was a startling experience because I normally think in terms of learning processes and outcomes that can be documented and here I was focused on the final product, probably because the failure mechanism is very real. The learning was also very real. Many ideas were not realized, but the learning involved can be actualized later on in different forms, such as the poetry/GarageBand project or in creating a prehistory-based Escape Room through Google/Microsoft Forms.

1. publication year range 2000-2017
2. use of game-based and traditional nonvideo game-based classroom instruction interventions
3. used at least one game-based classroom and on traditional classroom
4. participants were PreK-12-grade students
5. outcome based on mathematics achievement
6. video games could be inferred as “good” according to Shute and Ke’s 2012 definition
7. sufficient data reported to calculate effect sizes

1. elaborate on research procedures, assessment instruments, learning game(s) and learning outcomes
2. examine the effectiveness of video games within different mathematical domains such as geometry, arithmetic, algebra
3. links between game characteristics with learning outcomes

Having experience as an Early Years teacher, I think that participants should not include PreK-2-grade students because learning in these grades is more tactile and multi-sensory and often includes cross-curricular learning which could affect the learning achievements of mathematics. Overall, I found these suggestions to be practical. Lessons are formed around learning outcomes, so the dominant factor influencing lesson activities will have to support the learning outcomes. Administrators can be persuaded to set aside budget and training time for professional development and resources if there are strong links to learning outcomes, especially in mathematical domains that students often struggle with.

PRODUCTION

Taylor (2018) found that game stream productions feature the following components:

• set design
• material and digital infrastructure
• critique and evaluation
• sociality
• economic and commercial frameworks

These components were all present to some extent in the three livestreams watched.

Set Design

The three streams I watched, AdrianaChechik_, Brad_Taicho and fen_gaming have customized channel pages, but only the latter two use professional overlays.

Material and Digital Infrastructure

The streamers used a headset and microphone to communicate. Adrianachechik_’s stream took place in what seemed to be a darkened study. From a conversation she had with a viewer, her glasses are non-prescription, so they are probably part of her streaming gear.

Brad_Taicho’s physical set was his bedroom, which did not appear to have any specific materials displayed for the purpose of the stream. The lighting of his room looks to be part of the original room design. Bot notifications of new chat messages could be heard throughout his livestream.

fen_gaming’s background wall intends to have been decorated as a visual for the stream. From how the room lighting fell, a ring light was likely used.

Performance

The streamers have their own take on bringing humour and suspense to their game commentary. Notably, fen_gaming is fairly good at mimicking the game sound effects and Brad_Taicho speaks in a mostly calm tone with inflection points to express surprise or frustration. AdrianaChechik_’s performance was the most unfiltered. She narrated her gut reactions more frequently than she did her actions: “Damnn! Fatty’s f*cking me up. F*ck you fatty–I like fatties though” (AdrianaChechik_, 2022).

Her facial expressions were more varied than the others.

Change in intonation created suspense. During the wait for a battle to commence, the rapid-fire repetition of “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god” and rise in tone at the end revealed her excitement.

Critique and Evaluation

AdrianaChechik_ (2022) had the shortest commentary on her moment-to-moment actions, “Ahh, you f*cker! Ah sh*t! My stamina’s low”. Her game analysis mostly described the feel of different parts of the game, “Nah, I tried that area. It’s really harder than you think” (AdrianaChechik_, 2022). Brad_Taicho and fen_gaming are more seasoned gamers as tournament players and aspiring full-time streamers. They had in-depth analysis, sharing their strategies, comparing the games with earlier versions and noting the benefits and drawbacks of game options.

Sociality

Every streamer interacted with their viewers, verbally responding to chat comments almost immediately. Everyone welcomed newcomers and used different ways to engage their viewers. AdrianaChechik_ asked her viewers for help finding the “blue guy”.

fen_gaming asked for name ideas when he caught new Pokémon. Brad_Taicho engaged his community by competing with his subscribers in Mario Kart, voting on the next racecourse and asking them for 2-year subscriber badge ideas.

Economic and Commercial Frameworks

Everyone offers a subscription package with customized chat emotes, sub badges and sub-only chats and accepts donations.

fen_gaming sells merchandise. AdrianaChechik_’s channel page has a link to her Amazon.com wishlist.

SPECTATORSHIP

Wulf et al. (2018; 2020) observed that audience enjoyment is linked to the creation of suspense, parasocial relationships (PSRs) to streamers, Virtual Friendship/Respectful Interest and chat interactions.

Creation of Suspense

The streamers created suspense by verbally acknowledging their weaknesses during their play. AdrianaChechik shared how she did not want to go to the cave because she had been unable to pass through it on previous attempts. She also mentioned that she had no heal cure whilst entering a new area of the game. Brad_Taicho moaned how everyone liked to choose the course he found the most challenging and fen_gaming noted that he had an unbalanced team with too many normal Pokémon and that they were two levels too low. Receiving these insights into the streamers’ psyche, viewers mostly shared their tips and gave encouragement to the streamers, though some relished seeing the streamer struggle.

Viewers enjoying Brad_Taicho’s success and struggle.

Parasocial Relationships (PSRs)

Wulf et al. (2018; 2020) correlated enjoyment of the stream to the PSRs with the streamer. Streamers verbally thanked viewers for subscriptions and donations. Everyone has a published schedule while Brad_Taicho and fen_gaming have a countdown timer to the next livestream. There were frequent interactions between viewers and streamers: AdrianaChechik_’s viewers asked to see her dog (see image below). Brad_Taicho’s viewers asked for his opinion on the Veggietale Course and fen_gaming’s viewers talked about birthdays and names for his neck Pokemon. Streamers directly addressed these comments quickly.

Virtual Friendship and Respectful Interest

The viewers see the streamers as virtual friends. AdrianaChechik_ and fen_gaming greeted and remembered viewers: “Buns and Butter, I haven’t seen you in 4 months” (AdrianaChechik_, 2022). AdrianaChechik_’s stream had more conversations about her personal life. As she is closing her stream, her viewers refer to a conversation from a previous livestream about her drinking preferences which starts a discussion on how her drinking habits have changed. She encourages her viewers to join her Discord channel so they can plug their Twitch channels, like a friend promoting a friend’s business. Her viewers show respectful interest in her choice to end the livestream, asking about the production she will be working on before the next day’s livestream. The other two channels had elements of a virtual friendship, but their viewers’ interactions showed more respectful interest than virtual friendship, since most of the interactions were game-related.

Chat Interactions

Twitch chats create a “haven” for the audience (Kneer et al., 2012; Nauroth et al., 2015 cited in Wulf et al., 2018; 2020) by providing streamers with the option to make chats only available to followers and/or subscribers. Brad_Taicho and fen_gaming make it possible for non-followers to lurk by overlaying the main chat with the game screen. There were at least three active options for community interaction (lurker, subscriber, follower) during the streams. The option to display membership through customized emotes, along with multiple available commands added another layer to these interactions. Chats were places for exchanging game tips/strategies, joking around and glimpses into others’ personal lives.

Compared to Brad_Taicho and fen_gaming, the production components of AdrianaChechik_ ‘s stream are lacking, but were compensated by the viewer-formed PSRs. While there appears to be a formula for creating livestream game channels, missing parts of the formula could perhaps be compensated for through PSRs.

References

AdrianaChechik_ (2022, March 19). Boss fight tonight elden ring (ps5) [Livestream]. Twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1430980952?filter=archives&sort=time

Brad_Taicho (2022, March 20). [AUS} 200cc’s is simply too many monkasteer [Livestream]. Twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1431235866?filter=archives&sort=time

fen_gaming (2022, March 27). [AUS] [SAUMUS/RYU] Join me for a spot of smash: Pokemon legends: Arceus [Livestream]. Twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1437116143

Taylor, T. L. (2018). Twitch and the work of play. American Journal of Play, 11(1), 65-84.

Wulf, T., Schneider, F. M., & Beckert, S. (2018;2020). Watching players: An exploration of media enjoyment on twitch. Games and Culture, 15(3), 155541201878816-346. doi:10.1177/1555412018788161