Challenge
Environmental game for Elementary school children. Matthew McLemore founder of Buzz Mack Media was tasked to create a game teaching kids about recycling, stormwater pollution, and landfill reduction. Make it both easy to use for kindergarteners and challenging enough to keep the interest of sixth graders. This was a difficult want because of the attention span and cognitive levels that ramp up quickly at the elementary school age.
Process
A user study of children age kindergarten through sixth grade, boys, and girls, using various games and providing feedback on interest, challenge, and engagement. The results provided valuable information that would guide Matthew's choices in how to make the game simple enough for Kindergarteners but challenging enough for users who believed that sites like Nick Jr. where for babies. Matthew conceptualized the game and created wire frames and a clickable prototype of each segment starting with an educational video and an interactive character which was followed by a game reinforcing the message and completed with a questions and answer portion that tested user knowledge. Completing the quiz resulted in unlocking featured content.
Results
Using rewards and inclusion as an incentive to complete the game, resulted in the various grade levels of potential users learning the lessons of recycling and landfill reduction, Matthew created a detailed user flow and annotated wireframes into a clickable prototype that had three levels of difficulty ramping up based upon age. This enabled the younger children to complete the activity but also keep the older children challenged and engaged. The client was pleased with the results exceeding expectations for achieving business requirements.
