On Monday this week, we finished our Halves presentation. The 2 major questions for us were:
- How is it fun for the kids?
- How does it teach programming?
For the first question, the Tilt 5 and the cooperation it supports would be a large part of the answer – you’re not just learning alone, you’re communicating with another person, building something together that looks cool in 3D. All the visual and sound effects we plan to have will help turn the experience into a whimsical journey.
For the second question, we embraced the fact that our less-than-15-mins game is probably not gonna teach as much as a programming course, but the whole point of it is not to let the kids take in the knowledge of a whole lecture, but to get them excited about programming, and make the concepts fun and approachable for them, so it encourages them to learn other programming platforms (like Alice) or languages afterwards. In addition, even though our game is not teaching a programming language, it is helping the players understand the logic, which works similarly in all programming languages. If they get familiar with how the logic works by playing that game, they can easily apply this knowledge to real programming languages in the future.
Moving on, we plan to finish our first level – adding and separating the inventories, writing the logic to place signs on signposts, and replacing the models with our art assets. During our meeting with Dave, we are also recommended to finish the minimally playtestable prototype this week, and hopefully playtest among classmates first.
Some of the concerns among the halves feedback include:
- Not enough demonstration of the puzzle gameplay and Tilt Five top-down view in the presentation.
- Unclear whether Tilt Five is the right platform or meaningfully improves the experience compared to PC/tablet.
- Concerns about 7–8 year olds using the hardware comfortably and for the planned duration.
- Sign readability and spatial UI in Tilt Five were not well validated.
- Too few playtests planned, and no testing with children yet — need more iteration with the target audience.
- Uncertainty about whether the game is fun and engaging enough (needs more animation, juice, and exciting mechanics).
- Gap between strong concept art and weaker current 3D implementation.
- Need clearer explanation of how learning will be measured and evaluated.
- Questions about multiplayer value and collaboration dynamics.
- Slides and pacing could be improved; some sections felt rushed or visually underwhelming.
- Ending connection to programming concepts could be stronger.
Regarding the questions and concerns about 3D scenes and implementation, we are already fixing the problem by implementing art assets to keep up. Also, our designers’ current focus is to add more to the cooperative aspect according to playtest feedback. Hopefully our progress can answer a lot of these questions.
We also finished a google form to survey our playtesters, mainly asking them their experience with programming, how they perceive our game, and whether they learned anything. During the meeting with Melanie, she gave us some valuable feedback – it is possible that playtesters, especially our audience, wouldn’t be able to know that they are learning programming even if they are actually getting familiar with the concepts and logic. Another way is just to know their progression by observing how they proceed with levels. Maybe we can design the last level to show that the players grasp the concept if they complete it. In that case, the survey doesn’t have to cover all these questions.
On the other hand, we can also focus less on whether they actually learn knowledge, just say we are exposing them to concepts. Show our focus on user experience instead – the whole point is to get them excited about being programmers, not to get them to become programmers.
Moving on with these new suggestions in mind, we plan to improve the survey. We are also considering if we should add audio instructions to the game to teach the players how to start.