Museum Reflection

The opportunity to go to the museum and have our game interact with its intended audience (children ages 4-8) gave us some insight into the successfulness of various features and what would need to be changed if the prototyping process were to continue. 

Some observations from the museum include:

• Children who were not successful on their first attempt, often expressed a desire to play again, sometimes demonstrating greater understanding or faster play on the second attempt. Similarly, players who attempted the easy level first, and were successful, often wanted to challenge themselves and try the hard level. 

• When more than one child arrived at once, often the child who went second wanted to watch the child playing before them in order to grasp a greater understanding of how the game worked. This demonstrates the importance of observational learning. 

• In terms of technical components, the only major challenge we encountered was that our medium level wasn't operational. When we first arrived at the museum, and tested the code, it appeared to work at first, but the pico consistently disconnected from the computer, ultimately frying one of the picos. Despite attempts to replace the pico, the breadboard and put all of the wires back into position, the game ended up running with only two levels: easy and hard. 

• As discussed in the electronics section, we had originally assigned each level (easy, medium, hard) with time intervals (2 minutes, 1 minute and 30 seconds, respectively). However, when the medium level become nonfunctional and there seemed to be long pauses for the easy level, we changed the times such that easy was set at a minute and hard was set at 30 seconds. Regardless of these changes, there remained some confusion regarding the connection between the timers and he actual game, as children (and their adults) often wanted the ball to drop earlier, sometimes even pressing the small flaps attached the the servos in an attempt to get it to release. 

Throughout the time spent (2 hours) at the Boston Children's Museum, data was collected that gives insights into how players interacted with the game and the successfulness of these plays. Below is the analysis of this data that explores the ages of players, the difficulties chosen by players and the connection between the age of the players and their successfulness.