I enjoyed Week 15 overall.  Generating Personas has seemed a good way of capturing experience of how users or stakeholders view new developments, enabling those tests to be applied in the design of the product.  The Personas led on to Forces, conflicts and the Force Map.  The map became a little mechanistic to build but usefully showed the interaction between Personas and game design attributes.

The team has worked really well.  We could easily have agonised about roles, work division and outside distractions but instead, we have just got on with it!  Everyone has contributed showing a lot of self-motivation, leaving the team leader to steer and tidy, which Christine is doing effectively.  Good mature, self-directed stuff – what adult learners should be showing

We are now into more familiar H8XX territory – reviewing case studies and theories to see what is relevant to our design.  There is a lot out there, though one has to say that most of the more interesting approaches are research studies rather than real public games.  Mor et al. (2006) identified the combining of mathematical skills and instructional skills as the key issue but I would add game design experience to that.  It is one thing to conceptualise a game, quite another to know the tricks for putting it into practice.

I think that this is going to be the pinch point in weeks 17-19.  We will be overwhelmed with inputs and ideas and will need to focus those down to a game and game-play concept. Simultaneously however, we will be trying to learn how to put a game prototype together – an entirely different skill.  I hope it will not feel like a traditional TMA reflection – wondering if it was worth doing all the preparatory work to have so little in terms of output?

Mor, Y., Winners, N., Cerulli, M., Bjork, S., Alexopoulou, E., Bennerstedt, U.,Childs, M., Jonker, V., Kynigos, C., Pratt, D and Wijers, M. (2006) Learning patterns for the design and deployment  of mathematical games [Online], London, Institute of Education. Available at http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/4223/1/LP-LitReview-v2.pdf (accessed 24/05/13).