Parents need to learn some basic learning sciences and cognitive sciences to better support their children’s learning ability development, keeping in mind that these busy parents often can’t engage in learning for more than small chunks of time per day.
This project aims to lower the entry barriers for parents to effectively involve their children’s education, and to empower them with knowledge and practice. It provides parents easy access to scientific methods regarding how people learn. It also helps to raise awareness of family engagement in children’s development.
Currently, there aren't many studies about how educational knowledge such as learning sciences and cognitive sciences can help parents to support their children’s learning activities. However, educators and education-related professionals equipped with the knowledge indeed benefit from it, and generic family involvement improves children's learning performance. It’s a useful tool, and it’s just about who passes it on to the learners. Parents can be one of them. This paper fills the blank of how parents could contribute to children’s learning, and bridge the conversation of the communal effort in children's growth among parents, educators, and students.
Parents want and need to learn how to support their children’s learning ability development, but they want to learn it easily and practically without feeling overwhelmed and too tedious or laborious. This project provides a solution to equip parents with this knowledge through a playful experience.
Grounded in Experiential Learning Theory, I designed this mobile game to create opportunities for parents to recursively touch the four bases of learning: concrete experience through making decisions in challenging scenarios, reflective observation through revealing the choice effects and consequences, active experimentation through low-stake failures and adaptive feedback, and abstract conceptualization through real-life interaction and sharing.
This game design taps into the players’ playfulness by feeding their intrinsic curiosity and satisfying their sense of accomplishment. It utilized the Segmenting Principle to address the limitation of parents’ attention span, reduced extraneous effort related to the gameplay, and engaged players with minimal physical interactions but not sacrificing their mental effort in digesting learning content.
Looking back over the journey of designing and developing this game, I’m proud of the final product I’ve made, the tremendous effort I’ve committed, and the thought-provoking lessons I’ve learned through the process. The people I consulted with and playtested with were often amazed by the elaborate design. They were excited to play such a game to learn these interesting topics, especially the non-professionals in the educational field. I also felt contented that my thoughtfully constructed scenarios gained recognition and validation from professionals and current learners in this field. They believed my makings were meaningful and relevant to the parent audience as well as helpful to the future Learning Sciences and Cognitive Sciences students. I would love to see my work become an intermediary between learning designers and learning consumers and bring more and more scientific and theoretical understandings of learning to public notice.
Along the way of designing this game, I kept asking myself “What makes a learning game fun? Does the learning purpose of a game defeat the purpose of having fun, or vice versa? If the people who need to learn the most are the people who don’t want to learn the most, is Games for Learning the answer to the issue? How much of the playfulness relies on the design and how much on the player's mindset?” Emerged from the conversations and reflections I had with my players, peers, and advisers, I concluded that the fun core of a learning game should be the learning itself, other than that, the other game elements are all the lures to immerse the players in the potential enjoyment of learning. However, people are in a wide spectrum of playfulness, some can appreciate the beauty of learning even in a dull circumstance, whereas some may detect a slight trace of learning in a game and wipe out all the interests. But the root of learning against playing is autonomy. People who cannot enjoy learning are usually repelled by having no control over what to learn, how to learn, and why to learn. If the learning purpose of a game is to dump information into a mind or manipulate the person, it defeats the purpose of having fun; if the purpose of having fun is to escape from compliance, it defeats the learning purpose and any other purpose of being influenced. For the people who don’t want to learn, the reasons behind it are varied and intricate. Well-designed games and clever learning designs may address some of them, but may not address them all and for everyone. The entire ecosystem that the learners are involved in matters. Whether it’s for the reluctant parents or the reluctant kids, educational games are just one piece of remedy. The quality of the design and the mindset of the player jointly determine the perceived playfulness of a learning game, so the lesson for me as a designer is to treat people’s opinions as data points, and for me at a personal level, I should carefully maintain and intentionally practice playfulness and mindfulness as growing up.
There are many areas I want to do more research on. As I mentioned above in the corresponding sections, I need to thoroughly research my target audience to identify the right access to them, test the appeal of the cuteness-themed aesthetic design and human-vs-alien babyface design, verify the semi-realistic space theme for promoting transfer, scrutinize the scenario design, and conduct a full-scale playtesting in person with a mobile version prototype.
Evaluation is the weakest part of this project. I wish that I had spent more time on designing the assessment mechanics beyond the scoring system, such as embedding learning analytics and utilizing game logs to evaluate the learning outcomes. I also wish I had efficacy and effectiveness research plans in place. Although I learned and practiced my evaluation design skills in my other projects, this project posed a special challenge for me. The intended performance I want to measure is beyond the game. The end goal of this game is to improve the parents’ support for their real children, not just to choose the optimal solutions for the characters’ specific cases. It requires adaptivity and far transfer of the knowledge, and it may involve attitude changing and creative thinking. The perceived effectiveness of their improved supports also relies on their children's performance, which adds another layer to the evaluation challenge. I must admit that I haven't figured out how to define the constructs and translate them into actual measures. Longitudinal research over months, years, even decades may help figure out how parent players and their children change compared to non-players. The players’ in-game forum data and social media content can be analyzed to extract some insights.
To go forward with this project, I would consider gathering a team with professional artists to make original characters and visual designs, animators to visualize the scientific explanation of each choice, creative writers and subject matter experts in learning sciences and cognitive sciences to collaborate on scenario designs, and utilize participatory design with parents to ideate on minigame design.
I prioritized parent education over directly teaching children these basic learning sciences in my project. One of my considerations was that children sometimes don’t have a say in their learning experience and they haven't developed the metacognition to manage their learning before a certain point of time; some of them do have agency over their learning and the necessary metacognitive abilities, but they may have less power to reverse educate their parents even if they learned this knowledge from a game or somewhere else. Their learning environment is an ecosystem and their parents play an important role in it. The further expansion of this project is to make a kid version of this game as a self-help tool to help them better understand and manage their learning.