Game Design: Ed Tech Advanced Design Studio

As part of the T581: Ed Tech Advanced Design Studio course at HGSE, I worked on a project around the concept of "failing forward", aimed at reframing failure in a learning context, creating opportunities for reflection and growth, and encouraging positive self-talk for learners.

My team and I developed a prototype for our growth mindset game, titled "Fright Night".

EVIDENCE

FRIGHT NIGHT is a prosocial educational game, with a 3D maze as a foundation, enriched with a design that fosters growth mindsets and features subject-based mini-games.

1. Monsters: Overwhelmed by Homework

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Children are able to experience different social events in multiple pathways to get emotional feedback through the process of playing [1]. This process also allows children to figure out an ideal way for them to deal with the conflicts in make-believe games [2]. By walking into dead-ends and running into the monsters, players have the chance to encounter failures in the game. The monsters in the game are not real “monsters”, but the player’s friends who faced difficulties in school. We allowed the players to help the “monsters” with their homework that they used to struggle with and connected the storyline more to players’ daily life at school. We hope that by reminding them of the academic failures and related negative emotions, we could encourage them to learn the growth mindset and treat the difficulties in school in a positive way.

2. Subject-Based Learning: Science Test

Under the overarching 3D maze game, we also aim to include subject-specific learning at an age-appropriate level. In the demo below, the placeholder activity provides a taste of what we would envision for a science (specifically chemistry) activity. Gamification can be used to supplement formal and informal STEM education, even when aligning with the curriculum is challenging. An educational science game is a computer game that teaches players about a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics) topic through gameplay. This can also help reduce science anxiety symptoms from appearing in students, in which some students may feel panicked when facing science problems.

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Our game uses a simulation model which mimics a real-life scientific experiment that, according to research, could potentially support the cognitive learning process of players. It has been found that games and interactive simulations are more dominant for cognitive gain outcomes, and that when students were empowered to control access to simulations and games there were significant advantages over when access was tutor-controlled, where no advantage was found [3].

3. Growth Mindset: Candy Wrapper

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When players fail to pass the mini-game (in our demo a placeholder of an ultimately science-related test), they will receive a candy wrapper with encouraging words for their efforts. This will help foster growth mindsets in the players. Using praising words about efforts instead of praising intelligence to encourage players in the game will have a significant effect on promoting the growth mindset in players [4]. Research shows that attitudes about intelligence as malleable can significantly affect motivation, failure reactions, and academic achievement [5]. Individuals who hold a fixed mindset believe that they have a fixed amount of intelligence or capability and that this is an unchangeable attribute. Several studies have demonstrated that people with a fixed mindset view challenges and difficulties in life as measures of how much intelligence they possess, and view effort and mistakes as indicators of impotence [5; 6]. In contrast, people with a growth mindset believe that their ability or intelligence is changeable and is able to grow over time if they put in the effort [4; 5; 6]. These differences in mindset have effects on students’ academic performance. In a longitudinal study of 373 seventh graders, holding a growth mindset was predictive of continually improving grades over the school year while holding a fixed mindset was predictive of static grades [5].

To sum up, the main idea of our game is to make for an engaging, playful experience and at the same time promote a growth mindset and subject-based learning.

GAME DEMO

Explore the full maze and engage with one example minigame - Play the demo now!

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