Got To Go - An educational game on geography

Er Luo Chalmers University of Technology luoer1@yeah.net

Abstract
This paper discusses the design process and result of an educational game on geography that was designed to be played by 11-to-13-year-old children. It also describes the design process and the motivations behind our design choices. The project resulted in a game concept with a low-delity paper prototype.

Foteini Bogiatzi Chalmers University of Technology fotinibogiatzi@gmail.com

Author Keywords
Educational game, children, learning, geography

1. Introduction
Johan Sandstr om Chalmers University of Technology johan.m.sandstrom@gmail.com

According to Parker and Lepper [7], challenge, curiosity, control, fantasy, cooperation, competition, and recognition are all important elements that could be used to motivate players while they are playing educational games. All these elements are also mentioned in Habgood and Ainsworths paper [5] as well as Malone and Leppers article [9]. Thus we also took these elements into consideration in the design process. Gunter, et al. [4], describes that it is also important to keep a balance of fun elements and serious teaching elements in an educational game. Balancing these elements in a game is quite dicult as there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration. Dierent models were developed to evaluate educational games by

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Becker [2], Mitgutsch and Alvarado [8] as well as Gunter, et al. [4], and we applied these models for analyzing the existing games to get inspired for our own educational game. 1.1 Background There are already many educational geography games that have been released over the years. Two of these games served as a big inspiration in the design process. Backpacker1 and Where in the world Is Carmen Sandiego?2 . Backpacker is a Swedish game series for PC which lets the player travel to cities around the world. In each city the player has to answer questions and in order to aord to continue travelling the player has to take jobs in the dierent cities. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? is an American game series that originally taught geography aimed at preteens. The player has to decode clues and gure out where in the world they must travel to get more clues and nally catch Carmen. The information seems random however and thus the learning is not very well accommodated [4]).

that would t the aim of this project. We then brainstormed further together in the group while sketching and performed an idea evaluation method where we voted on which ideas we preferred, and why. Geographical facts are important to know in everyday life, yet they can be dicult to learn. Thus we decided upon a game that teaches students about geographical facts in ways other than textbooks. We wanted the students to learn the facts in a more fun way than by reading textbooks and be able to remember them later in their life. Since geography is a large topic, we decided to narrow down the focus on countries, relationships between countries, ags, cities, population size, landmarks (both natural and man-made).

3. Results
The result from the project is a concept for a competitive multiplayer digital game where players have to be the rst to travel to a set of countries given by the game. The nal version is a mixture of turn-based and real-time based game. Players need to play mini-games related to geography at each city in order to gain money and continue travelling. At least one mini-game must be played each time as it is a requirement to enter a country. The player who rst travels to all the target countries is the winner. There is player interaction by e.g. delaying the entry to a country if someone else has been there rst, or playing a game against an opponent in order to determine who will enter the country when two are trying to enter at the same time. Players have the option to travel simultaneously, but it is not mandatory and they can choose to play more games (in the scenario when they need more money to travel). For example, if a player does not have enough money to travel, he/she needs to stay an

2. Methods and Process

Figure 1: High-delity prototype of our game.

The process started with literature research in order to gain a deeper understanding about games and their eect on learning. We already knew the target group for our game from the requirements (11-to-13-year-olds) and had their school curriculum for reference. Each of us from the group brainstormed individually about potential games
1 More 2 More

information available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/ information available at:

wiki/Backpacker_(series) http://www. carmensandiego.com/hmh/site/carmen/

extra turn in the country to continue earning money. The decision of including mini-games was made in order to make the game more interesting for the children, see Figure 2. It was also designed as a multiplayer game because the competition could provide extra motivation and interest. We believe that the children could learn aspects of geography when they keep on replaying the mini-games. When we tested our game by ourselves, we learned that we were able to remember the correct answers by playing the games several times. Thus our design would be interesting for the children to play in an educational setting. Last but not least, this knowledge could also be seen as educational in long-term as children might not feel the knowledge they got from the games is useful instantly, but they might use it later in their lives due to their experience with this game.

Overall, we think that our game could contain all the learning parts in the Magic Bullet model. But it is still not the perfect game from Beckers point of view as the Collateral Learning and External Learning are ambiguous and only exist in certain situations in our game. Thus we need to add more gameplay mechanics or re-arrange some parts of the game that are related to learning and building on the knowledge gained. According to the MDA framework[6], there are eight types of fun. Our game falls under the aesthetic categories of Challenge, Fellowship and Discovery. A few examples that are under the mechanics category are turns, hidden-information, money-management, and risk-reward. 4.1 Motivation Early in the process the game was designed to be a mobile game that was only played for a couple of minutes at a time. A problem with educational products that are designed to be played at home is to motivate the users enough to use them willingly. Games that are played in school already have motivations in the form of extrinsic motivations because a teacher can tell the children that they have to play it. Deci states that a person is intrinsically motivated to perform an activity when he or she receives no apparent rewards except the activity itself [3]. 4.2 Including children in the design We were unfortunately unable to include children during our design process, and this is one important factor to be taken into consideration. Designing for children without involving them in the process is risky as their wishes and needs are not taken into account. Thus we feel that the project could improve much more when using participatory design with the children. Moreover, it was not possible to test our game with them, thus not being

4. Discussion
Figure 2: An example mini-game where players need to match landmarks to cities.

We applied the Magic Bullet model [2] to our game to evaluate it. According to the Magic Bullet paper, the must learn part could be any geographical knowledge that is included in a certain mini-game, which is needed to enter a country. Geographical knowledge contained in the whole game (e.g. country locations on the map, distances between countries) could be the can learn part for the player. The Collateral Learning and External Learning parts are a little bit ambiguous in our game. The displayed information for the players during their waiting time could be seen as Collateral Learning when the players can choose to read more information if there is no need or time to play another mini-game. Moreover, as Got To Go is designed to be played in school, the teachers could be seen as External Learning for the children.

able to evaluate it in a school setting. An evaluation with kids could uncover more mistakes and other game patterns could be discovered from the feedback. However, we tested the game among ourselves and thus could uncover some important gameplay mechanics. 4.3 Future Work One important thing that must be done in the future is to perform an evaluation among 11-to-13-year-old children in order to discover whether our design could actually go well with children in school and if they would be able to retain the knowledge. Also, as extra evaluation from experts from a dierent perspective, it would be good to use an evaluation method such as SEEM [1]. Another important step in the project is to program the actual game. As we only have our design in concept, the nal result is a prototype. Thus the current prototype we have for this game is made in the form of paper and digital mockups.

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[3] [4]

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[6]

5. Conclusion
Since we havent performed tests on our target player group we dont have any objective comments on how our game would aect the childrens learning on geographical knowledge. However, we believe that our project could be a balanced educational game in both making the learning process interesting for children and making the mini-games eective in helping children during their learning process. The combination of playing games and learning geography seemed to work well when we did the test on our own but will of course still need testing and improvement.

[7]

[8]

[9]

References
[1] Baauw, E., Bekker, M. M., and Barendregt, W. A structured expert evaluation method for the evaluation

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