That final playtest
Am making an attempt this evening to catch up on some of the blog posts from the final days of my project, as next week is a busy one with another trip to York, more trainings in Manchester, an interview!, and back to classes on Thursday.. But I want to get some thoughts down before I forget them all!
One of the things which I still need to write about is the final playtest, - a mostly great, albeit last minute experience. The parts where it weren’t, lay again in the computers at our school. Despite our fancy smartboards, the hard-drives are quite old and don’t have very sophisticated graphics cards, so it was only in this playtest that I saw that the characters’ meshes disappear at times.
In future I will need to test out things like these complex meshes on older/low quality machines because there weren’t any flickerings in the environmental meshes, landscape or assets due to them being low poly. Obviously, there weren’t any flickerings in my computer at home or school either. I was surprised and disappointed with this, as the characters are actually reasonably low poly, albeit made up of many more vertices.
Somehow, though, in spite of this, Jane’s students didn’t actually seem to mind - or rather I should say it didn’t hold them back from game play, even though one student advised me at the end that the school should buy Apple computers (cheeky!) . In terms of actual playing, during the game they were all so intently focused on the screen, on answering the questions, that it didn’t stop them from competing with each other.
The group were not driven by achieving points, however, again feeding into my hypothesis throughout the project - in the way I had designed it so that scores would show at the end of a question (not during the running) and also not within a repetitive leaderboard, only ever comparing at the very end of the game. This helped generate an environment where students collaborated within their own teams, and actually also across the teams! That was good to see, and I wonder if that’s due to the start of the game where all the characters dialogue on their shared goal of running away from the grammar test.
That said the questions could have been a bit more challenging - I had known Jane was teaching an elementary class, so had aimed for the lower end of that, say at the end of beginner/just at the start of elementary, however, several of her group had a higher level so got answers quite quickly. Obviously more challenge is much better than less!
In the end, when I asked them for their thoughts, they mentioned liking the colours, said that the pace was good, and when I asked them what they liked most, several mentioned the witch. She made it funny!
Overall, I was chuffed that my objectives of getting students’ attention, providing opportunities for autonomy, mastery and relatedness were all met.