Almost ready for our close up!
It’s hard to believe that this Friday marked our 11th week as Designers in Residence at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI). While we’ve been lucky enough to spend a great deal of time in the halls before this experience, working with Explainers as they designed and prototyped their learning games was truly an extraordinary experience.
First getting to know our Explainers
As a quick recap, our four intrepid Explainers began the experience with the singular goal of making the exhibits even more engaging to museum visitors. Yuliya and Samantha drew inspiration from visitors engagement with digital media within the halls and worked to create a digital game to guide and extend visitor inquiry throughout each hall, beginning with the Search for Life exhibit. Sam and Yuliya used their experience interacting with visitors to turn their idea into gamified experience and are ready to start playtesting their first digital prototype (below)!
Team Digital showing their new game!
Kumari and Leah were inspired by the interconnectedness of multiple exhibits and set to work creating a tabletop game where players seek to identify attributes of items found throughout the museum. Using science savvy, game mechanics, and learning science they were able to scaffold the game to be both bilingual for Spanish speakers as well as able to meet multiple levels of players from novice to experts by both age and the number of visits. Having successfully play tested paper versions of their tabletop game team tabletop (Leah & Kumari) are creating a more solid prototype that they’re ready to continue play testing for user feedback (below).
Team Tabletop preparing a new prototype!
We’re almost ready for our close-up and would love to see all of you when we reveal these two exciting prototypes and the process behind their games at NYSCI next Friday at noon. Come hear from the brilliant Explainers and team Killer Snails about designing learning games to captivate science learners and who knows...maybe come up with a new game idea of your own? We hope to see you there!