Adults Can’t Count Either: Design Tricks We Used at PBS That Apply to All Games
We aren’t telling you to treat your players like children, but we ARE saying everyone has a hard time counting past 3, no matter how old they are. Let's talk about the design tricks we used while making PBS Kids games that will make your games faster to learn and easier to play.
Encouraging Emergent Narratives with Puzzle Design in Décorum
How do developers encourage players to see moving pieces around a board as a relationship argument? In this session, game designer Charlie Mackin breaks down how her team injected narrative into their puzzle designs, while still allowing each player's group dynamics to lead the interaction.
The Development of a Cooperative Family Science App
In this symposium authors will each present an aspect of the creation and development of Operation Investigation. The presentation will focus on the co-development process, formative testing with diverse families, and the use of player generated content in the game.
Adapting PBS Kids' Hero Elementary to Educational Games
Creating educational digital games that complement a television property presents a number of interesting challenges. Especially when they’re supposed to be teaching science, while talking about superpowers. We’ll begin our presentation with a discussion of transmedia educational game design strategies, before sharing relevant examples of how our teams successfully adapted themes from the STEM-focused superhero series into meaningful game mechanics.
Scientific Practices Content as Game Mechanics
If the core mechanics and the the educational content are tightly integrated, you can more reasonably attribute player success to learning. By mastering the mechanics, they are mastering the content.
