Fruit Salad Yummy

Post Mortem Discussion
What went wrong, what went right, what works, and what doesn't...

Measure Hunt was designed and implemented as a Flash/AIR application for distribution via web browsers (exc. iOS) and as a standalone game (via AIR). It was implemented in Flash CS5.5/6 but it was constructed in such a way as it could easily be ported to the Flex/Flashbuider FrameWork/IDE. This would allow for it to be built as a multiplatform game that could run on most web mobile devices.

Overall the design development process went smooth. We got off to a late start, that made it a little rough at the beginning. Fortunately I have a good friend who is an amazing artist, Leslie J Harriss, he helped me with the character creation and provided the art for the cut scenes.

This game was never meant to be complicated or terribly difficult as it was targeted towards the 3rd grade level player/learner.

As such it utilizes Gagne's 9 general steps in the following ways:
1. Gain Attention - We use cartoon styling, whimiscal stories, and colorful characters to gain the attention of our targeted audience. All the characters have companions (dog, parrot, robotic mouse, etc...) and we've inlcluded a character of each gender for broader appeal.
2. Describe the Goal - Cut scenes and popup windows will be used to describe the goals and expected outcomes. There are still a lot of cuts and popups to be implemented to make the goals and gameplay more coherent.
3. Stimulate the Recall of prior knowledge - The student should be familiar with units of measurement, and the demarcations on a ruler. The rulers the game generates marked like a typical ruler and student might use. Common fractions and measurements are used.
4. Present the material to be learned - Cut scenes and help screens will serve to present the material to be learned.
5. Provide Guidance for learning - The characters companions are actully designed to be helpers. In the games final incarnation, the player would be able to ask one of the characters for help or instruction.
6. Elicit performance "practice" - The player is presented with incrementally harder levels doing basically the same activity. The goal is to teach the player to quickly and instinctively recognize and utilize the standard markings on a measure.
7. Provide informative feedback - At the end of each level the player is presented with a table showing attempts and results for that level. The final release candidate will feature interactive screens that further extrapolate the attempts and results and return measureable results and metrics in plainer language. The game could be implemented as a larger suite of games with true database connectivity that saves the data to a central server, where collected data could be used for more indepth analysis.
8. Assess Performance - See comment for #7...
9. Enhance retention and transfer - The first two levels play pretty much the same, but the 3rd level changes it up just a bit with a different methodology towards success. It's all basically doing the same thing but in the last level the measures will be a bit different, giving the player to transfer knowledge by figuring it out.

I can see that the game needs some retooling in the gameplay mechanism to keep it interesting as it gets a little repetetive, in my second meeting with my collaborative group of 3rd graders I could see they were a little "underwhelmed" (especially when the minerals goup was making a game similar to MineCraft...) so by going through the iterative design loop (Design-Prototype-Playtest) with myself and my kids, we did manage to make it a bit more enticing.

Currently the distribution of random numbers is a bit whacky, this and a host of other issues need to be fixed and/or addressed.

Overall a fairly successful and educational effort went into the creation of Measure Hunt. I plan to continue development and further develop the characters and concepts, possibly adding other components or whole games to the Fruit Salad Yummy/Measure Hunt family.