Game Design | Prototyping | UX Research | Curriculum Development
What Now?
Team: Fan Xia, Gabriela Szpilman, Lena Orfanos, Zoe Cohen, Helen Fang
My Role: UX Research and Design Generalist
Our team worked with Allergic to Salad to develop an engaging, after school curriculum for grades 6-8, focused on the concept of oppression.
Problem Statement
How might we develop students’ cross-cultural and social-emotional skills when participating in discussions with high-stakes/difficult topics?
Solution
A game that rewards players’ empathetic choices when faced with real-life inspired conflict.
Learning Theories
Situated Learning (Anchored Instruction): In-game card events situate a problem that can occur in real life, increasing the likelihood of students’ ability to transfer empathy skills practiced within the game.
Constructivism: The game can help provide students with the language to discuss conflicts they might have had experience with previously, which creates associations between their own lived experiences (their schemata) and the game.
Interview with Founder of Allergic to Salad
To begin our process, our team was able to interview Stacey Ornstein, the founder of Allergic to Salad, to gather information about what she was looking for in this project, specifically focusing on curriculum, history of the organization, learner analysis, and previous challenges and constraints.
Out of this interview, we developed insights such as:
Focus on a single concept
Provide more scaffolding than you think you need, especially for teachers
Make it as engaging as possible, possibly including something students can take with them when they leave
Brainstorming
Oppression is a large topic with many layers that looks different across societies. With this in mind, as well as the insights from our interview with Stacey, the team engaged in a brainstorming session to identify specific important topics, materials to potentially work with, and values that we wanted to guide our design choices. As a result of this session, we presented two ideas back to Stacey: a rolling map board game and a puzzle-piece map activity.
Partner Feedback & Secondary Research
After presenting our initial ideas to Stacey and our class, we realized we needed to take a step back to review her feedback, our classmates feedback, and our secondary research (sources below) before proceeding. While there were many differing ideas about how to move forward, we were able to find the most meaningful insights by talking with each other, referring to our secondary research, and asking questions of Stacey. We determined the most important pieces of feedback we received were:
Create specific situations that will relate to the students
Create detailed guidance for teachers in how to facilitate the activity/conversation
Ensure students are prepared before presenting them with the activity
Incorporate opportunities for student reflection, including but not limited to holding a discussion afterwards
Russell, K. (2022, April 19). History class is under the microscope. This National Teacher of the Year is diving into lessons of race and oppression. (K. Belsha, Interviewer) [Review of History class is under the microscope. This National Teacher of the Year is diving into lessons of race and oppression.]. In Chalkbeat. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2022/4/19/23032395/national-teacher-of-the-year-history-race-gender-ohio-kurt-russell
Sara Lichtenwalter & Parris Baker (2010) TEACHING NOTE: TEACHING ABOUT OPPRESSION THROUGH JENGA: A GAME-BASED LEARNING EXAMPLE FOR SOCIAL WORK EDUCATORS, Journal of Social Work Education, 46:2, 305-313, DOI: 10.5175/ JSWE.2010.200800080
Bloom, S. (2005, September). Lesson of a Lifetime [Review of Lesson of a Lifetime]. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/
Amanda Gebhard (2020) Power Relations, Knowledge Productions, and Teaching against Oppression in an Elementary Classroom on the Canadian Prairies: A Self-Study, Studying Teacher Education, 16:2, 204-221, DOI: 10.1080/17425964.2020.1742105
Coghlan, C., & Huggins, D. (2004). “That’s Not Fair!”: A Simulation Exercise in Social Stratification and Structural Inequality Teaching Sociology, 32(2), 177-187. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3211459#metadata_info_tab_contents
Board Game Iteration 1 and User Testing with Allergic to Salad Educators
After returning to the drawing board with our new insights and new understanding of our problem, we decided to focus on a board game in hopes of building a fictional space that reflects every day oppression found in society; a way for children to safely examine conflict.
From our feedback after user testing with Allergic to Salad educators, we were able to walk away with the following insights:
Create different settings on the board that relate to the students
Create different starting points showing how people start at different places in life
The + cards felt more like privilege than resilience, which needs to be changed
Think about creating more situations that are more collaborative/involve more than just one student
Board Game Iterations 2&3 and User Testing/Interviews with Students
Next, our team prepared to user test with students. Based on feedback from the educators, we iterated on our design and created two versions of our game so as to be able to test specific features we wanted feedback on from the students. We kept in mind that we wanted this activity to be engaging for the students, but also thought-provoking and encouraging of difficult conversations and reflections. Based on the feedback from educators, we made many changes, with the following being the most substantial:
Created a circular board with multiple starting points
Created “missions” involving deliberate reflections students needed to complete
We created two different versions of our board (by using black paper to cover up the center) to test different game mechanics. Both versions used the same cards, as the cards were the most important thing for us to test with the students at this stage as they are what drive the conversation and reflection on resilience and oppression.
Version 1:
Competitive
Players gain and lose money
Players try to “win”
Version 2:
Players simply moved around the board
No “winning”
Through observations and interviews with the students after the activity, we were able to gather helpful insights to help with our next iteration.
The Final Iteration & Design Rationale
After reflecting as a team upon all our iterations, feedback received, and user testing conducted, we narrowed our scope to a fundamental building block for understanding oppression: the language we use and the choices we make when an oppressive situation presents itself. Our final version provides a simplified gameplay that allows students to quickly focus on the cards, which gives them time to comprehend the way an oppressive situation can happen in real-life as well as consider how their actions and words affect said situation. Additionally, we created a curriculum guide to help teachers introduce the activity, run the activity, and provide opportunities for reflection and discussion, all while providing students with an engaging way to think about and talk about how oppression can show up in every day life.
Board
Same starting point and linear pathway: Students had issues understanding they had to start at different places. This change ensures teachers are not spending a large amount of time explaining the various starting points.
Expand the board with more spaces: Ensure learners have the opportunity to take as many cards as possible
Number the spaces (rather than +/-): Students immediately understood that + cards resulted in positive events and - cards resulted in negative events. They would lose interest quickly if they landed on a - space. This change ensures their interest remains throughout the game.
High-contrast color spaces next to each other: Avoid putting green and red next to each other to help color-blind students distinguish between each space.
Cards
Mix + and - cards: Mixing cards within one deck with nothing signifying which kind of event it is brings unpredictability to the game, which is more engaging for the students
Provide 2-3 choices for each event: Students wanted more options to choose from, so some cards have more than 2 options to choose from.
Increase the complexity of the choices: In previous versions, students said it was easy to understand what they “should” choose on some of the cards, which was not as engaging, so choices increased in difficulty. Additionally, to reflect real life better, some cards have choices where there is no clear “right” or “wrong” answer, just different ways to react.
Matching colored “choices” with “outcome”: This change ensures it is easier and faster for students to locate the outcome to their specific choice.
Tokens
Get rid of money, but keep tokens: In the previous versions, we had money and tokens. When money was involved, we observed students were oftentimes too obsessed with the money and had a difficult time stopping to think through the cards. Therefore, while the money was engaging for students, it also led to undesired motivations and gameplay. In our final iteration, we kept the tokens, which signify empathy. Some choices will cause students to lose a token. If they lose all 5 tokens, they need to go back 10 spaces to recover 2, as students need at least 1 token when they get to the end space.
Curriculum
Final Curriculum/Lesson Plans: We created a curriculum of 2 45-50 minute lessons, including a pre-discussion, the activity itself, and a post-discussion. The curriculum can be found here.