In this project we used participatory design and contextual inquiry to collect data from a class of fifth grade students in order to develop educational games for the use in a English course.
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Edutainment - minigames
Case Study
Keywords on what we worked with in this task: Interaction Design, User Involvement, Participatory Design; Contextual Inquiry, Quick & Dirty evaluation, Adobe Flash & Actionscript.
The Task
In this project I worked together wit 6 fellow students at the Informatics study. We used the project to explore the use of “participatory design” and “contextual inquiry” as methods for data collection. We used these method together with a fifth grade folk school class where had the goal of developing educational games (edutainment) for use in the English course.
Qualifications
This work provided me with an understanding of the quite different requirements that are need when working with children in a development project. It of course also provided me with an opportunity to explore the possibilities and limitations of using the two methods (participatory design & contextual inquiry) for collecting data with the children. For the development of the game prototypes we used Adobe Flash and Actionscript, and in that relation I developed two games based on the data that I had to work with. One of the games was a platform game, and the other one was a “snake”-like game. This provided me a view on the possibilities that Adobe Flash provides for creating quick prototypes, and quite some experience in the programming language Actionscript.
Results
Based on the collaboration with the children we used the attained knowledge to develop prototypes in Adobe Flash. We also described the advantages and disadvantages that the two methods for data collection gives in relation to the development of educational games for children. The result of this was a list of recommendations for other developers on how to use participatory design and contextual inquiry for such a project.
