Design Study 3 – School B

School B was a state funded secondary school in East Sussex, England. Three year 7 classes (aged 11-12) took part in a game creation project over the course of one half-term lasting 7 weeks. This study was organised and run in conjunction with researchers from the Flip project and involved use of the NWN2 toolset in an out-of-the-box state. 78 pupils took part in the project as part of their ICT lessons. The three classes were made up as follows: class X had 24 pupils (11 girls and 13 boys), class Y had 27 pupils (13 girls and 14 boys) and class Z had 27 pupils (13 girls and 14 boys).

The project took place in the final half-term of the school year, and each class had

approximately ten 50 minute lessons over the course of the seven weeks due to a bi-weekly timetable and some timetable disruption from end-of-term events. The games were created in an

ICT suite on the school’s own computing equipment, although it was necessary for the Flip project to fund an upgrade to the machine’s graphics cards so that they met the minimum requirements to run the game creation software. The ICT suite was arranged so that pupils sat around the edge of the room to work at the computers which were positioned against the walls.

I led the lessons in conjunction with other members of the Flip project team, whilst the class teacher took on a supporting role and focused on behaviour management. Towards the end of the term the teacher was able to field questions from pupils to a greater extent as his knowledge of the software and confidence grew.

Other members of the Flip project team and I gave a number of demonstrations on a projector screen which showed pupils how to carry out a range of important tasks within the toolset.

Pupils had free choice of which game-making activities to engage in when they used the software, although at the beginning of the project this was guided by the demonstrations given most recently.

3.3.3.2 Data Collection

Other members of the Flip team and I made notes on key events taking place within the classroom where possible, although we were in heavy demand to give advice and help to the large class groups.

Twelve children took part in targeted design activities towards the end of the game creation project. These took the form of individual design activities and a short focus group. Materials used in the design study are shown in Appendix A.5 Audio recordings were made of all design sessions and these were transcribed verbatim. Photographs were taken of design prototypes and incorporated into the transcriptions where appropriate.

3.3.3.3 Observations and Commentary

A key goal of this design study was to observe pupils creating games in a full class setting, as the previous school had operated an unusual setup with only 10 pupils working on the laptops at once.

In general pupils were excited about the project and continued to show enthusiasm throughout the half-term, although towards the end (nearing the summer holidays) there was some restlessness. The class teacher saw the project as an addition to the curriculum focused work, and in preparation for the project he had ensured that he had ‘ticked off’ all essential elements of the curriculum with these classes in the preceding year. He expressed an interest in using game creation as a way of teaching pupils about specifying control in software, and we

highlighted the extent to which specifying behaviours for characters and objects could involve these elements.

In an introductory session we introduced the project and the toolset, and gave pupils the opportunity to play an example game created with the toolset. The example game had strong narrative elements. Pupils were told that their game should have a storyline, and some form of quest or goal for the player to achieve. We gave demonstrations on the standard toolset activities, and included narrative elements which ran across the demonstrations connecting to a broader story where possible. We also provided worksheets which were handed out to pupils after the demonstrations which showed screenshots and step-by-step instructions. Despite this, we had a large number of pupils asking us to repeat the demonstrations for them in each session. With numbers approaching 30 in each class and a projector at one end of the classroom it was clear that not everyone was able to follow the demonstrations.

With the much larger class sizes, and all pupils working on game creation at the same time, this context was very different from that of School A in Design Study 1. There was high demand for help, with a near constant stream of hands in the air for each of the researcher’s help. The bi-weekly timetable meant that lessons were slightly irregular, and classes could go for up to a fortnight without a lesson in some cases. There was some disruptive behaviour from pupils across the three classes, but the teacher was experienced in behaviour management and quickly eliminated disturbances or asked the pupils in question to leave the room and report to the school’s central ‘behaviour management unit’.

There were some cases of pupils helping each other and passing on knowledge, although they were encouraged not to leave their seats as far as possible, and the class teacher tended to send pupils back to their own computer if he spotted them standing and looking over someone else’s shoulder. In some cases within a block of 3 or 4 pupils there was one who quickly became known as the expert, and fielded enquiries from those nearby pupils.

Twelve children took part in design activities towards the end of the game creation project, as discussed further in sections 3.4.5 and 3.4.6.

Towards the end of the project the class teacher encouraged pupils to concentrate on creating their final game, and gave them some specific directions as to what the games ought to include, expressed as questions to which they should be able to answer yes. After the session he

reiterated these for me as:

1) Is there a quest set up?

2) Are there conversations?

3) Are there actions linked to conversations?

4) Does the game give a reasonable level of challenge? (Not too simple but not impossible due to too many hostile characters.)

He explained that marks would be assigned based on how many of these points were satisfied.

These points were intended to simplify the task of marking a complex game, which the teacher expected to be incredibly time consuming. They do not focus on the quality of elements such as conversations or quests, but on the extent to which they are functional, due to the ICT

curriculum focus in this project.

In the final sessions the peer play-testing was carried out. This encouraged pupils to reflect more on how the players would understand their game and the extent to which they could follow the instructions and more subtle guidance given. I and the other researchers agreed afterwards that it would have been valuable to have done the play testing a few sessions earlier when there was still time for improvements to be made.

3.3.4 Design Study 4 – Workshop B