Demos and playable games from my PhD

Andy's Garden Games

Left: Children help Andy to “tidy up the apples” by putting them in the tube of the same colour.

Right: Children use the Magic Cloud to make rain and grow carrots in the garden.

Andy is in the Magic Garden. He needs to grow some flowers and some carrots, and tidy up the apples that fell off the tree. Can you help him?

The three mini-games in Andy’s Garden were developed as part of a PhD project which asked the question “Can novel and surprising elements of computer games motivate children with autism to communicate with other people?”. Andy’s Garden is designed for young children with autism, developmentally aged 3-7. Each game has a simple main goal and gives opportunities for exploration as well as cause-and-effect play. In Part 1 of the games, Andy and everything in the garden behave as usual. Part 2 and Part 3 present the same games, but these now include things that children are likely to find novel or surprising (e.g. changing the way that objects look and behave, changing sound effects, and adding new objects). A goal of the project has been to find out if these design elements can motivate children with autism to communicate with other people in a positive way. Based on previous research where children used a related technology (the ECHOES virtual environment), we believe that this strategy will be successful at motivating children’s communication. This project is at the “proof of concept” stage, testing this idea in a school setting with children who have a range of interests and abilities.

These games were devised and produced by Alyssa M. Alcorn (aalcorn [at] ed.ac.uk), as a part of her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, supervised by Professor Helen Pain and Dr. Judith Good (University of Sussex, now University of Amsterdam). It is based on research from the ECHOES project.

For further information on the research basis of the project, instructions for users, and credits, view the PDF linked at the bottom of the page, or viewable here: https://goo.gl/AP57GS

GAME DEMO VIDEOS

These video clips demonstrate 2 of the 3 touch-screen mini-games (i.e. Andy's Garden Games) created as a part of my PhD research: “Carrot Growing” and “Tidying up the Apples”.

For each session, a child always saw the hello scene, then played FLOWERS, APPLES, and CARROTS in that order, then saw the goodbye scene. Children never saw multiple game versions on the same day. Not shown here is "Growing Flowers", which has very similar mechanics to the carrot game.

Games are demonstrated in the following clips (1-3 min. each):

Note that clips have been edited for length, skipping some repeated actions.

NORMAL game version (played on Day 1 in first session, establishes expectations)

         Apples normal, Carrots normal

DISCREPANT VERSION 2 (played on Day 2, games are changed, giving opportunity to notice new or different things)

         Apples day 2, Carrots day 2

DISCREPANT VERSION 3 (played on Day 3, games are changed, giving opportunity to notice new or different things)

         Apples day 3, Carrots day 3

HELLO and GOODBYE sequences seen at the start and end of each games session (always the same)