The client is an organization that brings the world of creativity and games into the school world to create a new learning experience. The project was to create an interactive game that includes physical riddle cards and special missions which will help the kids learn the class subjects in a fun and playful way.
Full UX and branding strategy, Game architecture, Logo design, Graphic assets, UI design. Handoff to developers.
The team had to develop a new type of system, they wanted to give the user a lot of insights and still maintain information architecture simple. The main goal was to design a system that would break these insights by their importance.
The challenge audience is school students in 3rd-6th grade. It's a contest between the classes in the same year. I looked at the current governmental educational apps to see where we're at. The usabillity of most of them was more into software than a game. The graphic part had premitive look in most cases.
The next step was to check the current trending games for kids in this age range. These are very colorful and addictive. There's a complete investment and return process and the user get encouragements along the way. This was something we wanted to take with us to this platform.
The medium we had to present and play the game was basically the classroom projector. I though about a dashboard that will show the teams inside a classroom the status of each team and the status of our class in compare to the other classes in the competition.
Creating a connection between the students to the dashboard screen was a challenge because there's only one computer in class and the teacher is the one who controls it. As part of creating a competition environment we used symbols of lock and reveal while choosing bold colors to emphasize the mood.
The riddle part was a physical riddle card sorted into groups and each team got one riddle per stage. The team would solve the riddle and insert the code in the system to see if it's correct.
We built a grading system that will reflect the effort the students made to find the answer and the number of times they got a mistake.
We wanted to give the feeling of success within the process. So during the challenge, we paid attention to positive reinforcement and motivation that needed a push
The challenge ends with a final mission that includes all the participating classes and in the end, the treasure chest reveals the great treasure
We kept building the challenge visual language and system by making riddle envelopes, medals, participating certificates, and playing cards.
I gained experience in both game design and especially in educational games. The experience of designing for kids and making school fun for them was a big challenge. Being an Individual designer in a big developing project made every decision heavier while allowing me to develop my self-confidence by making calculated decisions based on prior user research and fixing it according to the user's feedback.
