How might we cultivate children’s creativity and open their eyes to every moment that is worth learning in daily life?
We came up with a game design workshop framework along with other auxiliary materials. The framework was adopted by elementary teachers to implement at their class in Tainan and receive positive feedback from both teachers and children.
“The values I see in your toolkit are that students can create their own games by playing, and the part that transferring a story into a game is quite a good challenge for children to learn.” ─ Teacher Shiu
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As User Research and UX Design Lead in the team, I arranged most of the design process, conducted user research/testing, and tailored the final solution.
We interviewed teachers who teach kids game design or creativity activities, elementary school teachers who adopt experiential education, and game designers.
It’s hard to understand kids simply by interviewing them. We reached more than 70 children to test and iterate what kind of game design methods can work for children. We analyzed how children design games to see what difficulties they met. The main obstacles are that they can't get into the thinking flow, that they can't turn their life experiences into new game elements, and that they can't come up with a complete game.
- A step-by-step scaffolds is really important
- Give space for them to just imagine anyway
- Adults need to make more efforts on guiding them to make an idea of game clear
- keep the whole process fun to maintain their attention
It’s a really long journey for us to finally work out the solution. We had researched on existing design methods, game design methods, and creative thinking methods. Then we tried them one after one, including modifying games, forced combination, bodystorming, role playing, place storming, and creative toolkits. Then we came up with 3 solutions based on those methods. Along with many rounds of testing again, we measured each solution and chose the one that is most coherent to our design goals.
A game is at least composed of goals, rules, and a specific start and end. By letting children create a creature and go into an imaginary world to tell stories through scripts, they accumulate game elements unconsciously in the meantime. The scripts contain most part of game system, but open up game goals and interactions and relationships among players. With creatures in the imaginary world, children can think more creatively and come up with more special interactions and ways to play. Meanwhile, scripts let children more easily to turn their stories into the very first version of their own games which can be better ones after iteration.
“This process teaches students that learning is deeply connected to life.” ─ Teacher Kao
“The framework is possible for teachers to leverage and adapt.” ─ Teacher Kao
“They (students who had participated in the workshop) have changed. They concentrate more on classes now.” ─ Teacher Chen
