Soft Opening Feedback

On Wednesday we have our first soft opening rounds. We received some feedback around the physics demo like adding a barrier on the side of the ramp to tell the player the box can be blocked.

There is also some feedback around user experience. When pushing the button some visual effect triggered could let players notice. Also, some sound effects like ball rolling could enhance the experience.

We also get some good points on the history demo. Mike said he was a bit confused about the arrows between each node so if the initial state of each level is without default arrows connecting nodes that could be better. 

On the side of the document, Dave said we can add some parts about why making educational games inside Roblox is better than other platforms. Roblox has universal control and graphics which are advantages because sometimes kids don’t care about gameplay they just love to see Roblox characters and objects. Also when we design the experience we are thinking about assessment methods as part of the design so mentioning that in the document is really helpful.

Later in the afternoon, we met Scott again and this time we were more focused on the documents other than showing the prototypes. Scott mentioned that we are not using the competency model in the game but it is part of the ECD model in the documents so it may need some extra clarification. In the documents, we should point out the mechanics that didn’t work well and find something which we didn’t have time to polish because this project is not about making perfect educational games but more about what Roblox can learn and improve through our study.

On Friday’s soft, the faculties is a little bit confused by the history demo but we want to clarify that not all the design choices we made are correct because the assessment methods are something all the developers and educators are researching on but even there are still many improvements can be made we still hope our findings can help Roblox and people who use Roblox to create educational experiences can be inspired. Like in the history demo playtests, some students rather than retry hundreds of times rather than read the description so someone who wants to develop a similar experience may want to reduce the text or find another way to make the reading more interesting.

Final Playtest with Middle School

On Friday we have our final playtest with Mellon Middle School since the final week is approaching we need to wrap things up. We really appreciate Matt and his students and it was a really good experience. The passion and engagement from students make us feel that our project is meaningful and teaching with Roblox is a potential use of it.

Next week

Before the ETC final week, we will present our project to our client Roblox so we will be working on that.