The Digital Game-Based Learning(5)

The design process began within a week, with a small team from both companies. In our initial brainstorming, we arrived at five key principles. First, we would try to be as contemporary as possible. Second, we would keep the pace of the game and the learning fast. Third, it was easier to teach a user to fix something than to create something from scratch. Fourth, the learning tasks would follow a consistent format so that they could be easily replaced or the order changed. Lastly, the learning tasks would be progressive, but not didactic.

Principle One led us to the theme of the game and the character of the main antagonist.

(A future, outer space theme, with the player being a top secret agent on a mission to save the Copernicus Space station.) This allowed for lots of futuristic looking parts to be designed and repaired. We hired Dub Media, a consumer games graphics’ house, to create a look that equaled that of the commercial games then on the market.

The “need for speed” of the audience dictated a fast moving game. Therefore, we chose to create a “Doom” and Quake” clone since our audience was going to be almost all male, and very familiar with this style of game. The player would run through the space station, encountering a series of tasks that had to be accomplished quickly in order to save the station, and requiring the use of the CAD software to accomplish them. We decided to make it a three level game, with lots of rooms, puzzles, evil robots to eliminate, etc, and to give the player only one hour of “game time” to get to the end. Miss this deadline, and the space station blows up spectacularly.

Our main antagonist had to be someone who broke things so the player could re-create them using the software. Gilad Atlas, a relatively junior team member, suggested “throwing a monkey wrench into the works”, and the main character quickly became “Dr. Monkey Wrench.” Though an alien, he would sport the taped-together eyeglasses and pocket protector that all engineers could relate to. Our learning game became “The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy.”

Fulfilling the final two principles — that the learning tasks would follow a consistent format so that they could be easily replaced or the order changed, and that the learning tasks would be progressive, but not didactic — proved far harder and more time consuming than inventing, and even making, the game. Our clients and partners at think3 were to a large extent teachers — the founder was a professor — from a very traditional background. Their idea of teaching was to start from the beginning: introduction to the interface, introduction to the workplane, simple lines and arcs, extrusions, fillets, and

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work their way through the “textbook,” feature by feature. We challenged them to come up instead with 30 “tasks” which, if accomplished in order, would lead the player from being able to use the easy features to being able to use the hard features of the program. They also insisted upon showing the player the “concepts” before they started on a task, so a short “concept movie” or AVI was created by think3 to introduce each task.

“Fire and Ice”

In only a matter of weeks, the models for the tasks were decided upon, the initial tasks created and the concept movies prepared. We integrated the pieces into our first prototype and proudly presented it to Joe. He looked at it and thought for a while. “Fire and ice,” he said gravely, shaking his head. “Huh?” said the rest of us. “The mix of learning and entertainment isn’t working, he explained. “The game is fire — it’s fun, fast and engaging. Then you hit the first learning task. Suddenly you’re back in school. It’s boring.”

Joe was right. We needed to make the “learning” parts as exciting as the rest of the game. How could we do this? The answer, it turned out, was urgency. You had to be made to want to complete the task as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to get on with the mission. How do you create urgency? It turns out there are professionals at this — they’re called Hollywood scriptwriters. So we hired one. Immediately out went the “You will now learn the following three things,” and in came “Come on Moldy, you’ve got to do this or we’re doomed.” The words “objective,” learn,” and “know how to” were banned, replaced with imperative action verbs like “build,” “get through,” repair,” and “rescue.” The concept videos introducing tasks were cut from 3 minutes to a maximum of 30 seconds, and began with “OK Moldey, here’s what you need to know to do this.” Wordy instructions were cut dramatically and spiced up with integrated video clips that showed how each thing was done. Later testing revealed that most users hardly ever read the text at all.

We knew we were on to something even before the field-testing. People in the company were bringing the alpha versions home ostensibly to show to their girlfriends and spouses, but really to ask their friends for hints on how to beat the game.

The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy was released in the fall of 1998, to critical acclaim from the engineering community. It was distributed as a separate training disk — the only training — with the thinkdesign product, under the educational heading “think fast.”

Costello’s strategy with Monkey Wrench was both a learning strategy and a marketing strategy as well. He was convinced that the game could, in fact, sell the product, especially to engineering students who were still forming their tool preferences. Through the creation of a demo version — two levels instead of three — that could fit on a single disk along with a trial version of the actual thinkdesign product, the demo disk was bundled into sixty thousand copies of Caden …… 此处隐藏：5846字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……