Playtest Overview

As we mentioned in last week’s post, we attended ETC playtest day event to test our latest prototypes and gather data from our target audience as proof of assessment and feedback for the prototypes themselves.

Overall the playtest went really well. Most testers can understand the interactions, and levels and can understand the topics of our educational prototypes. For the assessment, we received many data from about 25 testers and we hope we can prove the effectiveness of the assessment by analyzing those data.

Here are some feedback and information we gathered from surveys.

For Physics, most testers are around 10-16 which is very close to our demographic (13+). 

Around 70% of testers have learned friction before so they may already be familiar with the content in our demo. 

After the experience, about 88% of testers understand the difference between rolling friction and sliding friction though they may don’t know the term.

Our data can show the same result as in the survey or maybe a distinctive result. Like in this example, players take more than usual time to finish the third level so they may not be as good as they mentioned in the survey. Data analysis could be a good tool for assessment and telling us whether students really understand the knowledge.

Back to the playtest, from the surveys and interviews, testers think it could be better if we can make the control panel smaller so they can observe the ramp & ball & box more clearly. Also, they believe that the current level is a bit easy so we may want to have more complicated levels based on friction.

For the history demo, we have similar distribution on the tester’s age. Though different from the Physics demo, almost half of the testers never learned European exploration history.

After the experience, there are still some testers not understanding the connection between the tiles which means they may not learn from the experience. We will use the test results to update the experience.

Updates on Prototypes

Based on playtest and feedback from last week’s meeting with ETC faculties and clients, we added two additional levels and a coin system as mentioned last week to reduce the chances that players passed the level without thinking and polishing the first two levels so they can observe the different types of friction better. 

There are some big updates on the history demo, we moved the texts from binding on object to UI so now the texts are more readable. We also break down the text into several nodes so players won’t spend too much time reading. 

Visiting Mellon Middle School

On Friday, we went to Mellon Middle School – Mt. Lebanon School District and met with Mr.Mikesell and his students. We got the contact information from our ETC educational coordinator John Balash and reached out to Mr.Mikesell for potential playtest opportunities.

Mr.Mikesell’s students are all 8th-graders exactly our target test audience so we show the demo and let them play the experience. They expressed their interest in playing Roblox for educational purposes so we think it could be a good opportunity to discover more advantages of educating & assessing students with Roblox. Next week we will bring our updated demos for another playtest session.

Next week

We will start working on forming the assessment document that can be used as a postmortem of our semester-long Roblox Educational Game development and also as proof of assessment methods in Roblox. We will continue polishing the experience and playtest with middle school students to gather more evidence on assessment.