Challenges study

  • Sep 21, 2012
  • 1 Comment

This weekend, I will be launching back into studying what makes a good challenge.

Challenges in Looking Glass are designed to inspire story creation. They try to provide a compelling context and set-up to hopefully launch the user straight into coding his or her story without having to struggle over an original plotline and scene. However, challenges are new, and without a strong user base yet, we do not yet know whether or not they are actually motivating.

I plan to continue looking first at what makes a challenge inspiring. I have been running small user studies at the St Louis Science Center, and will again this weekend, to determine essentially what the formula is for the makings of a compelling challenge. Which challenges are the most popular, and why? Do users come up with story ideas quickly based on the chosen challenge, or do they flounder on what story to create? Are users generally satisfied with the story they chose to implement in that challenge? Did they feel railroaded into picking the story they implemented, based on the scene set-up or prompt? If so, is that OK? And so on.

Once we feel that we have a general grasp on what makes a challenge generally inspiring and popular, I then hope to start studying what effects challenges have on the user experience. For example, do users spend more time programming on challenge-generated projects than they do on personal projects where they need to additionally focus on story generation and scene set-up? Are users more confident in the stories they pick when they chose them via a challenge? And, perhaps later, what are the effects of other challenge entries on the user's choice in what they create?

Comments

  • caitlin

    caitlin said:

    <p>I've been looking at the spreadsheet and comtemplating how best to look at prompts. I think what you want to do is pick challenges that exemplify the best of what we currently know. And then look at prompts through that lens. And I might argue for 3 kinds:</p> <p>none</p> <p>one that suggests a reasonable story</p> <p>and one that suggests an unexpected story</p> <p>One of the things I'm curious about is whether or not the prompts can create a problem. One possible interpretation of what you've seen so far is that if a prompt is unhelpful, kids ignore it. If that's the case, then there's no harm in adding a prompt, even if it isn't always helpful. On the other hand, if the prompts feel constraining and kids don't choose to ignore them we have a clear downside.</p>

    Posted on Sep 21, 2012

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