For eSpark’s first venture into creating our own games, I helped by mentoring our team of learning designers – teaching product design basics to get the team up to speed on creating specification documents.
I was able to spend a bit of time exploring game-creating software, learning game programming with Unity and Construct 3 – though the emphasis was placed on working with the team to quickly produce specs and design guidelines which could be used by remote developers to create games to meet educational standards.
I created some detailed storyboard-like specs to show the flow of the games – here are a few examples, starting with “Math Monsters” a game to teach the difference between the “tens” and “ones” in a two-digit number::
Below are a series of images from the spec for “Olive vs. the Dragons” a game to teach the difference between long and short vowel sounds. As questions are answered correctly, the dragon is knocked further and further back until it is sent away from the castle.
…and here’s the finished game from the developer!
These images from the spec for “Area Adventure” – a game where students would calculate areas, perimeters, and the length of the mssing side of a rectangle to unearth archaeological finds.
…and here’s the finished game from the developer!
I needed to provide detailed notes to help our remote contractors make games that met our educational goals and were easy for children to use. Figma helped me put together some simple before/after examples and notes that I could share to keep things on track.
Our hope is that the different visual styles of the games will excite kids with a variety of visual styles – there’s always something new to see!
In the space of less than half a year we were able to create almost a hundred games targeted at specific learning standards
So far, the new games are outperforming the previous non-eSpark-produced games, with higher positive ratings from students and better quiz results.
