M5: Prototype & Rationale

• Cognitive load

The greatest challenge for parents to systematically learn the science behind learning is their limited time and attention span due to their already heavy burdens from life and parenting. Therefore, the top one must-have feature of this game is the segmented play and learning sessions. Each Training Planet represents one learning topic for no more than 5-minute gameplay and allowing interruptions anytime. Players can control their paces and choose the contents to learn. They can replay any part of the game information to review and inform their decisions. This design illustrates the Segmenting Principle which saying “people learn more deeply when a multimedia message is presented in learner-paced segments rather than a continuous unit” (Mayer & Pilegard, 2014, p.316). I emphasized minimizing parent players’ essential overload, not only because the materials are complicated but also the learners’ cognitive capacity is limited under the special context.

In addition, the robot servant is playing the role to provide additional instructional support for players to orient in this game. The player can choose to mute the robot or select specific supports when they need it. This design gives learners control over the learning experience, especially when they have high-level prior knowledge or want to experience the whole without interruptions. The Learner Control Principle is used to facilitate players’ self-regulated learning (Scheiter, 2014).

Since the subject matter content involves metanarratives - how parents/players learn and how children/characters learn, in order to reduce unnecessary confounds, I simplified the game characters’ training tasks to fictional tasks which can be easily understood through basic life experience. Players do not need any content knowledge to complete the task challenges for their game characters. For example, they do not need to know a second language to help their game character to pass the vocabulary memorizing task; the task is narrated as an elf’s name memorizing task to focus on memorizing arbitrary information and to separate semantic memory out; what they need to learn is spaced repetition.

• Situated learning

The scenario design aims to provide opportunities for Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The scenarios in each Training Planet present problems that closely mirror the real-life difficulties. All of the scenarios are originated and recast based on the collected authentic stories and situations parents had when supporting their kids’ learning. The preview function of the player’s choice on game characters gives the learning content at the exact moment when the player needs to learn.

The second feature for transfer is the bonus portals. They are designed to facilitate the High-Road Transfer (Perkins & Salomon, 1989). Players are required to consciously abstract the principles learned from the game to apply to real life, such as identifying real-life learning opportunities and practicing supportive skills by interacting with real-life persons.

The character design and narrative design are featured with futuristic elements. To avoid players applying the knowledge mechanically, I intentionally eliminated the game characters’ age characteristics and rewrote the training tasks as fictional as possible. The balance between alienating from reality and mirroring the underlying problems is the key to effectiveness. Players should not replicate the steps without adapting to their children’s actual situation. They need to decontextualize from the stories and then re-contextualize to reality. The game characters represent the entity with learning abilities rather than specific age-group children. Besides the emotional design value, the futuristic out-space baby characters hint that they have the learning needs as human children, but the goal is shifted towards long-term learning ability development instead of exam-centered and utilitarian goals parents are unwillingly trapped in. The realistic underlying challenges encourage near transfer, whereas the unrealistic narratives facilitate the preparation of future learning and attitude building.

• Information representation

The highly visual nature of games makes the information representation not only compelling and appealing but also cognitively engaging. The Multimedia principle states that “people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone”(Mayer, 2014). Based on the Guided discovery principle (De Jong & Lazonder, 2014), the game map illustrated as 3-dimension incubator galaxy map scaffolds players to form a mental model of how balancing and mixing 3 dimensions of learning will benefit each other. The dashboard which presents the game characters’ attributes and stats is a progress report to display the structure of understanding children’s learning ability development, the consequences of different learning supports, and immediate feedback to guide their experiments. The visual effects of each choice players make in different scenarios are designed in alignment with the Animation principles (Lowe & Schnotz, 2014) to help players to understand better. They visualized the science behind the options. The Signaling principle (Mayer & Fiorella, 2014) is applied to highlight the key information the players should notice. This feature also instantiates the Feedback principle (Johnson & Priest, 2014) that explanatory feedback is better than corrective feedback alone, which is the score in this game.

Suggested by the integrated cognitive affective model of learning with multimedia (Plass & Kaplan, 2016), emotion and cognition mutually influence each other during learning.

• Positive mood

The affective challenge of the subject in this game is that parents have been experiencing stresses and frustrations when dealing with children’s learning in real life, which may negatively influence the learning in this game because the challenging scenarios they will encounter in this game are very similar to real-life problems. Negative emotions narrow attention whereas positive emotions have a broaden-and-build effect (Carver, 2003; Fredrickson 2013). This game design should ease the narrowing effect that the parents who are under negative emotions such as anger and anxiety only selectively process the information to address the troubles at hand, but ignore the big picture of cultivating children's learning abilities, and fail to notice unexpected opportunities to promote children's learning and avoid larger problems. For example, parents may feel irritable when the kids detour around the quickest way to get homework done before the deadline, so that they directly give the answers or the best solving steps to the kids, and blame the children’s idling. This negative emotion could hinder them from learning and using Cognitive Modeling to vocalize the through process and promote children's self-management skills to cope with uncertainties and setbacks during problem-solving.

To induce a positive mood, visual design, interaction design and musical score are designed to create a lighthearted and playful environment.

The main game characters are shaped as round-body, big-eyes, small-nose and short-chins human face babies with futuristic adornments such as astronaut suits. The babyface effect can introduce positive emotions and enhance comprehension of science topics and knowledge transfer (Um et al., 2012; Plass et al., 2014). Other game characters such as the robot servant and the scenario-specific elves are all in round shapes, warm colors and strong positive expressions to generate positive arousal. In general game sessions, they are rendered in 2D to avoid overtaxing players’ mobile devices. While in the win state, the game characters in 3D AR format will induce higher positive arousal to give players a thrilling climax experience of their achievement. These design features of game characters are grounded in the findings from Emotional Design for Digital Games for Learning (Plass et al., 2020).

The background scenes are set in clean and bright colors with a consistent style. The music track during the gameplay and the sound effects of the game events are relaxing with happy beats to boost players’ positive emotions to a high arousal level. Studies showed that high arousal contributes to higher gains in cognitive skills comparing to a low arousal game (Homer et al., 2019; Rose et al., 2018).

The interactions in this game are simply multiple choices to tweak a game character’s development. There's no time pressure, no significant failures but guidance and constructive feedback in the game. The re-playability makes the failures and undesired outcomes a necessary learning process. The social sharing function creates a common ground to discuss and reflect even without actually meeting the problems in real life. The free exploring and competitive and collaborative play can elicit greater situational interest, satisfying players’ curiosity and enjoying the challenges.

This game is designed for informal settings, so the ability to attract and motivate parents to try and continue to play it is highly relying on the visceral design and reflective design (Norman, 2004). To achieve the visceral reaction of “wow, interesting, I want to try it”, the game idea’s simplicity, the cuteness of the visual design, and the futuristic narrative design should create the initial attraction. However, the retention depends on the perceived value it provides, especially related to the learning effectiveness and enjoyable experience. The cognitive design and affective design I discussed in previous sections will contribute to the reflective side.

As to engage players in learning from the gameplay, the incentive system is designed to leverage players’ intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

• Achievement

Even though the basic game sessions are scored by points, which taps into players’ extrinsic motivation temporarily, the main function of the scoring is to provide visible feedback of the game characters’ development. This extrinsic motivation leads to an intrinsic motivation by presenting the progress towards a performance-approach achievement (Elliot & McGregor, 2001) of successfully cultivating the game characters. This achievement-related intrinsic motivation in the game also echoes the individual interest of parents to cultivate their own children in real life. Parents are naturally proud of their children's success. The win state of this game mimics the experience to elicit pride by launching the well-cultivated future babies into space, receiving their photos of different achievements, and collecting them into a digital photo frame. Players can collect as many different game characters as they want and share their achievements through the social sharing function. This feature harnesses the social influence to motivate players to keep playing it.

• Self-Determination

The core of the incentive design is built on players’ intrinsic motivations generated from the three conditions - autonomy, competence, and relatedness suggested by the Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002). Players can define the cultivation goals for the game characters or choose exploring mode to see what they will become. The training tasks and learning trajectories are non-linear narratives players can choose and customize, which provides autonomy. The game characters’ attributes and stats show the constraints to confine players’ challenge choices on an optimal level to feel competent. Along with the game characters’ growth, players will have more “resources” to take new challenges. The relatedness is rooted in the target audience’s need of knowing more about how to learn and support learning. The players’ game identity and real-life role are highly aligned. The scenarios are fundamentally realistic and similar to real-life challenges. These features are all designed for fostering intrinsic motivation for players to engage in the learning activities.

The social sharing function is the main feature to apply social factors. Besides the affective and motivative benefits discussed above, the social sharing function facilitates Social Learning (Bandura & Walters, 1977) and learning from Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

• Social learning

The gameplay cannot cover too many nuances of practice but only illustrate the principles and basic applications. The social sharing function is designed to supplement it. The in-game forums located in each Training Planet allow players to share their authentic experience and questions related to the specific topic they are learning. Players can learn from diverse practices by observing and imitating other players’ instances.

• Community of practice

They can also share their thoughts and game achievement with their trusted circle by pressing a social media share button. It can promote discussions and prepare them for future learning in a real-life context. They can also notice the new paths and different aspects the game has through comparing with peer’s achievements.

The phenomenon of Sharenting - sharing parental care through social media - is increasingly common nowadays. The motive is “to receive affirmation and social support, demonstrate the ability to care for children, social participation, and documentation (Latipah et al., 2020, p.4807). Without the negative impacts of sharing about real children, such as issues on children’s privacy and sense of insecurity, sharenting virtual game characters can take advantage of the positive impact, such as receive social support, including new experience and knowledge, spreading awareness about the importance of preparing kids’ future learning abilities, influencing other caregivers in order to get better support of family and friends. It is also “a caring effort to participate in shaping a better community environment, with the initiative to share knowledge about parenting on social media” (Latipah et al., 2020, p.4811). The community built around this game will become a Community of Practice on the game level and social setting level to promote learning.

• Social context

The primary gameplay is solo play because the goal attainments of individual players are not relevant to others. However, collaboration and competition are added to the bonus portals to involve more participants such as the children or other players. This feature aims to tap into the social resources other participants contribute to create a rich environment for learning.