A brand in progress. Dawgsome is a dog walking and sitting business. The pet-services market is saturated. But, few invest much into their brand and online presence. I have been working with the owner of dawgsome to build the business from concept up to a full-time business. Our starting point was Guinness, the owner's dog.
Following a user-centred design methodology, a prototype mobile game concept was built to bring current mobile-gaming trends into secondary education. Background Game theory and design is an area that is seeing more and more academic research. Electronic gaming has changed considerably over the last few years, so have the platforms these games are played on. However, the educational games we find in app stores and classrooms for teenagers could be described as little more than “chocolate-covered broccoli” During the project I worked collaboratively with secondary school students to create prototypes. These ranged from low-fidelity sketches to a web-based application. The game The end game combined the goals of the teachers we spoke to. A reminder of the day's class Did not need to be manually graded Could show how well a student had understood a topic Could identify students that need extra help And different goals from the student: should be fun able to do while watching tv, on the bus... see how I compare with others (without them seeing my scores) The end result was a quick-fire quiz style game. The teacher could set questions from their lesson. Students would need to concentrate intensely for each short round but would be free to leave and return to the game at any time. Students are encouraged by rewards (stars) and seeing a leaderboard of their classmates scores (not their classmates names) as extra incentive to keep playing. The teacher can get an understanding of how students are doing and identify knowledge gaps in individuals and groups. this can then inform real-world incentives and even the classroom seat plan. A series of short, medium and long term goalsPlayer control, a player must have to make decisions that affect the gameplayImmediate and specific feedback to the userA reward system/sTeaching aspects for the longer goalsVarying skill levelsA player should not be led by the hand throughout the entire game The prototype The screen part of the web-application prototype (made using jQuery and PHP.) is an iframe, when the iframe page is loaded by itself it shall scale to the size of a user's device. This allowed me to gain feedback about a mobile application quiz from multiple users of both personal computers and mobile devices. When the page loads the progress bar starts moving. When it gets a third of the way along, the colour changes from green to amber and the first hint is shown. After the bar is two thirds of the way along it changes from amber to red and a final hint is shown.
