Bringing Mars Down to Earth: Designing Educational Games for Low Income Students

[Music] hi everyone thank you for coming to our talk they've asked us to remind you to turn off all of your noise making devices and if you could at the end fill out your session reviews that would be great feedback for us thank you today we're here to tell you how we built a real life Magic School Bus that brought Mars down to earth for middle school students first I want to take you back to the year 1997 think about where you were in the year 1997 that was about 20 years ago in Mars terms this was the year that the Pathfinder Rover landed on Mars in middle school terms well this was our friend Tanya and in middle school she was obsessed with animals she would spend every afternoon in her backyard with her camera photographing the animals and her garden that were there and telling stories and and her all time

here at this time was her history teacher miss a fast-forward a couple of years and Tanya's 10th grade science class gets to participate in the Mars Millennium Project of the year 2030 and Tanya gets to work directly with some experts from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design what it would be like for a human colony to travel to Mars they're starting to figure out what would it be like for humans to live on Mars as a design challenge and she's thinking for the very first time what do people need to survive on Mars how's it different from here on earth we can't breathe the air but could we build a city there what's it like and and how do we know the answer to all those questions she felt a bit like an explorer about to plan a trip to a new place that she'd never been and that was the day that Tanya became curious and this curiosity sparked her lasting tenacity that guided her all the way

through a PhD in Martian geology and today tanya is the planetary scientist at Arizona State University and she's been a part of the Curiosity rover operations team that provide daily instructions to pilot the rover on Mars and there's something that Tanya's story has in common with many many others in her field and this is this clear turning point where science went from this abstract thing of the world of adults to something that became meaningful to her in her own life and while you and I might take for granted having access to great teachers and science experiences and we're all Tamiya here at a game development conference because we had that type of access unfortunately not every student has access to experiences like Tonya had to see that spark in fact schools in America are really falling

behind on stem and that science technology engineering and math and as a result we're closing doors on students to these promising career opportunities that they can have ahead and don't take my word for it we ask the student to tell us about her least favorite class [Music] because besides we don't really do any like experiments we just she just makes us write notes and stuff for the being the only time I ever get to do experiments we never get really do anything fun science is prescriptive students are told what to do and they don't have permission to explore an experiment and figure it out on their own so it's hard to blame the student for not wanting to take science home with her and put the extra mile into that that she might really need to develop a deep interest in it and like a lasting interest in making this her

career so the Verizon Foundation posed this question of how might we allow middle schoolers to step first hand into the shoes of an explorer to spark their curiosity in ongoing stem learning and their aspiration is to reach a large number of students who currently don't have this type of access and the reality is that most of these students are students of color and girls and resen foundation came to IDO to pose this question I do this is our company we're a global human centered design firm and we like these big sticky challenges and we look for ways to help other companies navigate through them and so that meant that we had a team come on to envision how we might address this question and this team developed the rendering that you see here this was a team at IDEO in the end we'll show you what this has

become the reality of this real world Magic School Bus that we built and here it's envisioning a bus meets spaceship interactive field trip goes to schools for 45-minute classroom sessions reaches about five per day and students will come on pick up a tablet and learn how to engineer Rovers that they get to deploy on the Martian landscape in order to look for evidence kind of early provocations here and how we might balance individual forces group collaborative versus competitive play it's really just the vision at this point and we had to figure out how to make it real to do that we needed a highly interdisciplinary team so by way of introduction I'm Kate and I'm a software designer and I'm Peter I'm a game designer and when we were brought on to this project we brought together this multidisciplinary team and we were all really excited to work together

because everyone brought certain superpowers from their diverse disciplines it was really important for us to deal with the massive number of unknowns up front namely we never built a game together before because I do isn't only a game design studio we do a lot of work from product design to marketing strategy and game design so we had to figure out how to work together and it was important that we use our different skill sets to inform the way we go about designing our game we had our in-house education expertise as well as a mainstay of IDEO projects design research along with a number of skills that we traditionally associate with game design like software and interaction design and it was super important to get this right in the first time because we only had 13 weeks and five people to actually build and design this game so you can well that's the laser pointer you can imagine that we learned a lot of hard lessons along the way and so we've broken those down into

four key lessons which are comprised of a core concept and four takeaways that we hope you can take back to your design processes to inspire future design in this area so the first of these is that we actually had to figure out what game we were going to design we didn't really know what the core mechanic was we didn't know the specifics of the game itself at this point in time the experience looked like this it was very much a blank slate so we had to figure out a number of things and there were a couple of things we knew we knew that there would be Rovers and that you would play the game on tablets but how did you communicate with your Rover I mean kids like texting we should do that that seems fun and what are you doing with Rovers on Mars usually we're looking at geological evidence or we're searching for evidence of light but do we want to tell kids that they're actually finding evidence of life because we don't know that that's true and finally when you send a rover to Mars you can't change it anymore that's it so

this doesn't really lead to an iterative approach which is something that we wanted to emphasize because we were trying to teach engineering so to start figuring some of these questions out we decided to create a prototype this was a card game with a 3d digital map of Mars that kids could drive Rovers around and then there were some parts that had them building structures and solving logic problems we were testing today we were testing a number of things from can the kids understand these really advanced science concepts - do they even think Mars is cool is that something they even want to engage with and we were also looking at a number of different interactions trying to see what they gravitated towards did they like physical interactions or did they like working on a screen so at the end of the play test which was the first Friday of our first week as a team together we asked them you know what did you learn and we heard a lot of really great things we heard oh I learned that we send Rovers to Mars because we can't breathe the air and we when we're

talking about aliens or sorry the search for life we're not talking about aliens we're actually talking about microbes and these are great things to hear from middle schoolers we also heard that the purple section of Mars has ice flow which means there might be liquid water I don't know if you've ever looked at a map of Mars but there's no purple section we had split Mars into four quadrants and color-coded them so that we could better facilitate a certain kind of gameplay but we also told kids that this was an educational game so why can't there be a purple section of Mars the adults are telling me there is so this leads us to our first takeaway that your mechanics can miss instruct when we design games we're abstracting reality to build a bridge from where players are to where we want them to be and this is super important to make your gameplay intelligible but that bridge that you built can just as easily obfuscate the truth that underlies your mechanics and in the end it's that truth that you're trying to teach and so for our first core concepts these represent key pivotal realizations in our thinking

that we were able to integrate into our design process so the first one we're gonna look at is contrasting two kinds of testing because this first realization that the way we design our game influences what we're teaching was really important to get right up front very early on in the design process so the two kinds of testing that we're going to look at testing to validate and testing to learn emblem are emblematic of these different kinds of learning that we could have gone through so we could have been designing for a core audience people that we knew what they wanted for the most part as it was we actually challenged ourselves to test with a few extreme users people who have really strong opinions and who will give us strong reactions core users tend to give more nuanced reactions because they're already being designed for we also could have tested late in development or with high investment prototypes but this is really obvious to your players they can see that you put time and effort into what you're making

what you're showing them as it was we showed them early prototypes things that we quite literally spent a day developing and this allowed them the freedom to tell us and believe me they did that our game was pretty bad what this means is that the leader in development you test the less changes that you can enact in your designs so you end up tweaking your design as you get further along because we were testing on the first Friday and then every two weeks subsequently in our design process we were actually able to completely change course throwing out most of our first two prototypes testing later in design and only being able to change your designs a little bit means that you're reinforcing your biases by sending what you designed out into the world because this game had really specific goals and a very specific audience we wanted to make sure we were hitting those marks and so because we were testing early and we were able to just completely change our design based on what we heard we were able to change course to meet needs that weren't even identified in the first two prototypes

one of these is that we actually can't rely on a high level of digital literacy in this particular audience as video game designers we kind of rely on that literacy when we're putting a game out into the world with these kids some of them might not have ever picked up an iPad before we also saw the solution in this first prototype kids are actually really comfortable with working with their hands and so we took this as a sign that we could use physical literacy and physical metaphors to compensate for a lack of digital literacy so we scrapped our first prototype and designed a new mechanic around drawing lines this is how you drive your Rover and this is something that every kid has done since they were very little and if you remember Tanya from the intro well we brought her in as an expert to infuse this mechanic with actual science and actual information about how Rovers are driven on Mars she was the perfect inspiration for this project because the experience she had is so humble Ematic of what we want to create in students but her expertise also lent the deep

science knowledge that we wanted to impart to kids as well so we then play tested this again we used thumbtacks string and some cardboard and we mostly made up the rules on the spot with the kids in the room and we found that we could see them gravitating towards the interactions that they really found compelling when we showed this to teachers we asked them you know what do you want us to design who do you want us to design for and they said to design for the kids that need it the most but don't leave out the kids poised to excel and so it'd be easy to be like oh great so just design for everybody but we actually took this to mean something very specific it meant that we had to start at zero and introduce the idea of Mars and Rovers and why we send them there and the importance of the search for life in the universe and build to a level of complexity where kids are grappling with these advanced engineering concepts as they're ready to encounter those ideas so when we talk

about some students who may be ahead or behind what that means is we're designing for a sixth through eighth grade audience in practice their learning levels range from about fourth grade through 10th grade so to give you some real stories behind those extremes at the 10th grade seeming level we had an eighth grade who was already obsessed with computer programming and math and science and he showed us pictures of the stormtrooper who made Halloween costume that he had which was accompanied by a flamethrower constructed out of a barbecue lighter and cardboard amazing and on the other end this was the student who had just come over to America from Portugal and he couldn't read or write English so although he may have been normal in the learning curve he was not able to act normally in a classroom so we wanted to figure out how to serve both ends

equally well and where we were at this time in the experience was that we had resolved this very essential game mechanic of being able to draw a line to navigate your Rover on Mars and in doing so the battery meter would go down according to the type of terrain that you are going over forcing you to have to choose the right set of wheels in the engineering loop for your Rover so we needed to figure out okay we've got all these students playing this game on Mars but how do they actually get to Mars how do we take them from their classrooms all the way to feeling immersed and like they're really on the red planet we decided we would do this with a video sequence that too will initiate their launch into space and so here in our second play test we are prototyping storyboards and voice actors and the type of narrative that we might use to take them there we had so many things

that we wanted to learn in this play test that we didn't have as much time to be really thoughtful about how we set up the session so we went with what we thought would be a nice familiar setup to allow students to really express their opinions and you can see we've laid it out just like a classroom so there's essentially a teacher and a bunch of students we had also found in our first play test that when we were asking students to verbally give us feedback not everyone was comfortable with that so we added a written evaluation to this as well not only did we leave out the student who was just over from Portugal who couldn't either engage in the written or speaking as clearly and we had also set ourselves up for sabotage this student had allowed given us a 10 out of 10 and on paper given us a negative 10 out of 10 which cancels out to zero so it's very hard for us to get good feedback and what we could have

said oh there's yeah we just didn't get the right students in know that was not the case the students were doing their job they're the experts here we had made a fundamental flaw and that was in recreating the classroom setup we had failed to connect with students at their level we had walked in as a fairly poorly trained substitute teachers and we're trying to you know extract things from them as even the very best of teachers would have a challenging time doing what we really needed was play posture and when you look at the dog in the bear here there's a reason that the bear is not signalling to the dog I'm here to eat you they he's asking to play and to actually get dog really and it turns out that play posture works well on kids and and this is quite different of philosophy than the classroom setup so I want to break it down to a way that

you could also apply to your work so first step is to break the convention maybe sit backwards in your chair or on the floor start with warm-up activities and this could look like having them ask you questions to show that you're participating and you're here to create a dialogue not a question answer structured format and you might follow their tangents laugh at their jokes and most of all don't talk down to them we realized that this was making a tremendous difference in our play test going forward and so why not also apply it to our game to do to do this and to get inspired we looked at what books and films our students watching that they really love and is really hitting the right tone with them and we found universally that these books and films made kids the heroes they put kids at the center of the plotline and ultimately it was they were in a

position where adults needed their help and not the other way around and so we changed the narrative of our game quite intentionally so that instead of going to Mars on this educational voyage just for the sake of collecting science this is what they're told up front but when they actually get there they get a call in from NASA that NASA has lost their Curiosity rover and students are the only ones there to do anything about it the students have to figure out how to work together to recover the rover that the adults lost and so that is a really empowering moment where that they get clicked in to realize oh this is taking place now this is not people making me think about my future I'm really here doing something and that was also a really big part of what we're calling an emotional journey or an emotional arc and this is another fundamental technique for helping connect with

people at many different levels by creating something that like the emotional undertone of the whole experience we're bringing the group along through the whole story without having to rely on advance our understanding a scientific detail to progress as you can probably sing the opening sequence of your favorite science fiction film such as Star Wars and that helps you remember and bring yourself back into the experience you just had we worked with a real Orchestra to craft a custom floor that would help guide the emotional journey of this experience in the best case scenario we would have loved to bring in kids to tell us what should we put in this game what should we design we're here to do anything that you want we tried this once and student advised us to suck the oxygen out of the bus ultimately that would be the most fun most dramatic most realistic and it turns out kids love high-stakes adults

and kids have like very different perceptions of what they think would be yeah the right level of drama here so we did not listen to them directly but we did look for what the underlying need was and we brought in Tanya once again to help us infuse science into this and to get quite specific here Tanya taught us that in very recent science although it was thought that Mars had a solid core we're actually starting to believe that Mars may still have a liquid core and that means that it has remnants of a magnetic field that can create an Aurora and Aurora is nothing other than a geomagnetic storm that can knock out frequency of communication like the tablets that students are using on the bus to communicate with their Rovers so we very careful carefully in every experience orchestrated a moment where the tablets get completely knocked off line in a whole bus blackout caused by this

incoming geomagnetic storm and students have to work together to navigate the surprise crisis and figure out Oh what do we do like this we're in real peril we have to be able to get home eventually and I think this pretty highly ranked says as their favorite moment in the whole experience so at this point we'd been designing for an audience largely in broad strokes just working with the entire group of kids because each student is actually having an individual experience on their own tablet we could really personalize the experience to each student as an individual and at this point in time we were really ready to start grappling with these design challenges so at this point we had this intro sequence with a you know sweeping score and an exciting story as well as a call to action where the adults asked the kids for help this leads into the kids designing their Rovers to overcome navigation challenges

as well as gathering evidence of life on Mars in their search for curiosity and so we had this digital prototype that we could put in the hands of students and actually just see how they were performing and when we did this we had our we were running another play test we actually saw that you know they were they were understanding the gameplay they were they were engaging with the science they thought Mars was cool which is this point in development would have been bad if they didn't and so you know we're seeing these kids are engaged except for one of them who you know as he's progressing roughly equivalent with his peers he's getting frustrated he's not perceiving that he's on the same path as them he's not understanding the solutions to problems when he meets a level he doesn't quite understand why and he's he's really clearly getting drawn out of the experience so much so that when we told them that the experience is over and it's time to put your tablets down he threw it across the room and he wanted it as far away from him as possible and as the people responsible for those

tablets that was a little nerve-wracking so we had clearly failed and I think it's easy to see how easily we could have missed this sign had we not been in the room with him but as much as we had failed this was also the game's job the game is there to teach the kids in a path that makes sense and it needs to bring them back in when it recognizes that they're not on that path of optimal learning Engineering is cumulative everything that you learn builds on something that you learned before and so if you miss a lesson we can't rely on that knowledge to build on in the future so this is where we can actually use level design as a tool so in this video you can see this is level one this is the only moment of direct instruction that we have in the entire game and if kids follow it verbatim they actually can't beat the level they have to design a solution to get around to this problem thereby learning that those big rocks are not reversible by their Rover we can now rely on this information going forward and build on it in future challenges this is important because we can actually apply

this lesson to every challenge we introduced to the kids throughout the game to step back a moment we needed to be in the room with the kids to see this kind of disengagement it's pretty clear that we wouldn't have been able to see that from screen recordings or a playback of the students play session because as I said he was roughly equal with his peers what we needed to be looking for were things like body language and his visible signs of frustration like how he had checked out and how he was collaborating with his classmates as it was we were able to see these because we were in the room watching the students not the game and we were able to redesign the experience to circumnavigate this ever happening again with students on the other hand there are some things that you'll see in play tests that you actually want to bolster in your game you want to design for those if it's players cheating that's actually a sign that they've found something engaging if they are thinking through your rules well enough to find workarounds they have found

something that they find exciting playing with trade-offs if a kid is really super focused on what you've designed or if they're experimenting with your mechanics these are all signs that you've done something right even if it was my accident and it turns out that this is super easy to see with middle schoolers because unlike adults they don't wait for instruction they will just poke at things they get bored very fast and I think this leads to them being like I'm just gonna mess with your game while we saw this we were actually able to just take out all over the rules and let kids design or design the game so that kids could discover the mechanics that we were designing so here you can see that this kid is collecting evidence and he's found a solution to this problem but we never instruct them how to do this the screen will pretty much respond to any input that they provide prompting them to go further to dig deeper into the mechanics it was also clear from this play test that no one learns the same way and

while that's sort of obvious in hindsight it's something we found we could design into the experience while in commercial games it's a bit of gray area to have your game change its difficulty based on how players are performing if a player comes back and sees that the game is different they're not going to be super happy about that in our case kids never come back they play this once so we could completely have the game reroute its trajectory to best serve the learning goals of each student so you can see in this screen which is where students redesign their Rovers that there are a number of locked icons at the bottom each of those icons represents a category of tool so we have evidence collection power and cameras and so each of those categories represents a different challenge that we can introduce to players and with this system we can actually introduce each new challenge at a time that is optimal for that player the game asks how did you do on the last level are you ready for the next challenge or should we reinforce that with another level that tests the same thing and

finally and this is my favorite point from this entire design process our players derive immense pleasure from breaking your game we saw across the board early in development you know our game was a prototype so it wasn't catering to everyone as well as it could be and kids would check out and you can see it it's so easy to see and then they would break the game and find something that you know they were pulling the wool over our eyes and suddenly they were excited they were like look what I did I beat you which is great but how do we design that into the experience so here you can see a student has figured out that he can view the logic that defines where he can drive his Rover so the green sections he can drive fast yellow slower and red his battery will die well before he gets to the finish and he figured that out just by scribbling all over the map rather than drawing a single line which is what we wanted him to do at the time this was actually broken you could only draw a line as long as you could drive so it wouldn't let you draw further he'd just drawn so fast that it skipped the condition and

he could keep drawing forever rather than just fixing the logic problem here we actually reengineering so that we a battery meter at the bottom now that displays how far your rover can drive and we let students draw a line as long as they want we never tell kids that this is an option because there are better ways to play but if someone discovers this they get some excitement out of that they feel like they've pulled the wool over our eyes so as you can see some students get super honed in on what's happening in front of them on the tablets and that's awesome that's creating this like deep learning experience of engagement they're doing engineering but they're doing this on a huge bus with 16 4k televisions on wraparound screens simulating immersion on Mars so if we have them staring down at their tablets the whole time they're kind of missing the potential of this big collaborative space that we have opened up for them and it was kind of on us to really

figure out how to direct their attention at the right moments so where we were in the experience is that we put a lot of careful thought into the subtle cues of teaching guiding students through the game on the tablet we had figured out how to introduce all kinds of cool science including using your cameras to find different types of evidence everything in the game had a meeting and we had borrowed very cool real science clues from real Mars science on what Rovers are actually collecting on the planet sorry and use those to guide students towards finding curiosity the one thing we will not reveal in this talk is how students actually find the Curiosity rover but when they do they're able to send up all the evidence that they've collected to be analyzed and test whether they think there's likely life on Mars or not so in our fourth

play test we had created this end-to-end game where we could get from the start to the finish and still had some time to make a few changes but when we were able to set it up in the room we could just sort of start the experience and then sit back and observe what students were doing as I said we saw at some time but given that we're doing this all in 13 weeks we had a big presentation and deliverable coming up we wanted really good stats on the playability we wanted to understand how it was going to scale and so we did the the largest play tests we'd done yet and we had only one tablet per student and we had no backups and had things gone really well you know we could have gotten reinforcements of the data that we did but things did not go well and one tablet died completely and we had no backup so where we could have thanked the student whose tablet died and sent her on her way we actually paired her up

with another student and they worked together on one tablet and well one player / one tablet had really demonstrated good intuitive learning they were engaged with the game we had no idea what was going to happen when we put two students on one tablet would they start competing would they take turns who knew and and what we did find was that all of a sudden they weren't negotiating each move and they were speaking aloud the exact answers to the questions we were trying to ask them at the end of the game by which time no one wanted to talk about it or they'd already forgotten so these students had like taken a huge step forward and they're learning and we had an educator in the room who referred to this in educator speak as metacognitive learning and what that means is is that's the difference from saying I know to saying I know what I know and it is this yet met a sense of learning and it demonstrates a real absorption and

retention of the knowledge that they've built through the game so we suddenly realized that collaboration wasn't just a nice fluffy aspiration for this game but that it was really quite essential to doing what we wanted it to do and what we're figuring out how to direct students from their tablets to working with one another to working on the big screens that all just became a big challenge of choreography and with so little time left to really change course in the experi we had to pull a few tricks out of the Hat one of which was to just offload our technical challenges into what we call meet space that is the space that you and I a Q PI and where we could have done really complex peer-to-peer network networking with tablets to allow them to collaborate together we instead added simple cues to encourage students to collaborate together offline where we

could have provided very detailed tool tips whenever we find a student needs some reinforcement or a new suggestion while they're playing the game we instead have the facilitator of the experience the in character on the bus they are to observe students in real time and we really just needed to figure out how to create tools for that person and these were ultimately tools that would help parameterize problems rather than overly optimize on a single solution and there are a lot of things that had to be dynamic about this experience ranging from the playtime I said roughly that a class period is 45 minutes but it could range anywhere from 30 minutes all the way up to 90 minutes so our experience had to shrink or grow another part was the difficulty if they're working with particularly young class or a particularly advanced class they needed to be able to scale the difficulty and thirdly something could

break or there could be a big hang-up in the experience for whatever reason and rather than stress test every single infinite edge case we needed to simply create the tools for the facilitator to advance the whole game when they realized they needed to so we're relying on some human intuition which of course not every game has access to but we fully used it to our advantage so coming back to this collaboration and directing attention we brought in Tanya again to inspire how we might present some clues offline to encourage students to work together and she taught us that the Curiosity rover actually has JPL printed into its tracks in Morse code so that it's driving as its driving along Martha it's leaving that message printed into the sand and so we have the students find clues that that don't say JPL but they are Morse code clue that they have to work together to crack in order to

figure out in what direction the rover headed and we found that by introducing this early in the game and foreshadowing the play pattern that we wanted students to use to succeed they collaborated far more frequently throughout the rest of the experience in celebrating the individual contribution to the group we needed to figure out how to display player impact and and one way we did this was simply to count and display all the evidence includes that they were collecting but another key moment was that at the beginning of the game before they get into the engineering part they really just get to choose the personality of their Rover and we do this through audio and expression and color and flags that they'll select so that when the rover is on the big screens that they recognize it and as you can see here what the rivers have in common is that the wheels are the same

because we couldn't just make an open-ended design Rover these things had to be re-engineered to have real meaning so at the beginning of the game all that actually matters is that they have a certain set of wheels to be able to iterate from the same base and none of the other components matters so they do feel a lot of ownership when they're first creating these Rovers when they launch them onto the big screens this is quite a magic moment for students to look up and and these words from arthur c clarke that any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is really what we were striving for in this experience and i want to remind you that although everything going on is going to seem magic to the students and that's really how they wanted to experience the content it is accurate it is real science except where we've necessarily had to make leaps to get them to Mars so we're both trying to meet the needs of educators and students

by combining technology and magic so at this point we'd created an experience that really made the kids and the experts both in terms of the content and how they are perceiving it and its relationship to them and in terms of who we need to go to to actually finish this experience at this point in time we have the full student experience built but it's actually not on the bus it's in a prototype environment in our office in San Francisco we had to go down to Burbank to actually stick it on this thing which at the time was really just a big metal box in a parking lot there was a long road ahead of us of dealing with the ability of graphics cards to render 16 4k videos to dealing with networking issues that arise when you are sitting inside a big metal box so fast-forward six months and we have what you see the final bus and we run our final play test with kids in the DC area actually on the bus

his kids approach they see a bus it's cooler than usual but it's definitely not gonna like take off or go to space or anything their first clue that something is up when is when they come into the captain's area of the driver's seat and they see this futuristic sci-fi area with a you know control panel and a joystick in the hall that they then go into the main cabin where you can see all of the windows are TVs displaying a live feed of what's outside so they can actually see and wave to their student their fellow students as they get on the bus the facilitator comes on acting as the mission commander and tells them all right we're gonna go to Mars we're gonna help NASA discover if there's evidence of life there at which point they take off and go into orbit they fly past the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station at which point the astronauts there actually say hello and then they travel to Mars which of course in we're sorry they actually travel throughout the solar system and they learn what the criteria that we think there is

for they're actually being life in the universe this does involve going faster than light of course at which point they land on Mars and experience this are we alone in the universe is there life on other planets explorers have been asking these questions since the beginning of time today you'll be joining that grand tradition of space exploration Explorer lab it's now your job to locate curiosity and its tools to do that you will need to deploy a unit of rowers and log any evidence of life you find along the way explorers do you accept your mission

so while they're on Mars they work together to follow the clues that curiosity has left behind discovering if there's evidence of life along the way during which time they actually deal with the realities of the Martian geography including a full bus blackout and Aurora at which point somehow they find curiosity and send all of the evidence they've gathered to the rover to be analyzed at the end of the experience they actually get to make a recommendation to NASA of what they think the likelihood of there being life on Mars is the rumors then parade back past the windows as they go back into storage for the journey home the bus then lifts off returns to the students to their class their class parking lot at which point they look outside and invariable you see that it's snowing and start asking if they can go back to Mars until now we've reached about 2,500 people the bus has been in operation

since January of a sample of those a majority were non-white and more than half were girls 78% said that they had a stronger interest in completing high school with more than half also saying that they had brighter prospects in a stem career and so with that we'd like to leave you with a couple of takeaways a couple of provocations to hopefully inspire a future design in this area the first is how might we link education and play to make meaningful change in students access to opportunities and second how might we step into someone else's shoes when we design games rather than designing games that appeal to ourselves so with that I'm Peter Slattery I'm a senior game designer at IDEO I have a fine art and computer science background from Rhode Island School of Design where I started designing games and have since taught game design in Georgia and Boston as well as designing games for idea like

the bus as well as designing some games that have gone to CES oh and extreme environments qualifications were of course important for this project so I've been developing mine since I was 11 as a Boy Scout moving into getting lost canoeing in the Canadian will as well as running high intensity obstacle course races I'm Kate snip ring I'm a software design lead that I do my backgrounds in computer science and fine art from Dartmouth and I've been making games that I do Jeet are creating guitars that teach you how to play guitar at hide-n-seek creating James Bond interactive fiction games and some of my extreme environment qualifications include scuba diving down to 40 meters and climbing to the furthest point from the center of the earth we definitely want to acknowledge that it was not just the two of us working on this or a lot of partners collaborating on object from our company I do whisky tree the Masters of the beautiful computer graphics you

might know them from Star Wars Matt hutchinson our composer mg bio our facilitator team West Coast Customs creators of our fabricators of the bus also known for pimp my ride and Verizon innovative learning who made this all possible but I wanted to remember that we designed this for kids and this is really at the forefront of all of our minds the whole time we're not doing this to launch a product just for the sake of making something cool we want to do this to help those kids be in this room in the future and if this experience can cause just one kid to go through what Tonya did and have this like awakening moment of discovering that science might be for them then we really succeeded thank you so much for attending our talk

and we have time for questions hi great work I've three-part question can you talk about budget time constraints and team composition like how you guys distributed the work yeah so the the portion that we've shown here is the design of the student experience and in that in that case it was these 13 weeks the subsequent following phases there were several rounds of revision and putting it on the bus which are not logical from a team budget and etc timing standpoint so I'm just speaking to the student experience which is probably most relevant to anybody else there were five of us on the team the team that we showed earlier in the slides including software game design education design flesh systems interaction design and different support from writing and research kind of

integrated along the way and we kind of set it up like work stream so instead of having a project manager overseeing everything we really just shared ownership over different parts so that they would kind of come in and out of confluence and in that this was client work we had occasional check-ins with our client but they let us run pretty freely to propose what we felt was the right solution to the ultimate problem the budget questions I'll have to look up the numbers I don't know off the top of my head but the whole project in terms of everything put into it including the bus would be a couple million thank you hi thank you for the presentation I did like the bus part so at some point in your presentation with you talked about the deep learning experience the students were having so my question is how do you define deep learning experience students having and

what are the indicators you are looking at to say oh they are having deep learning so this goes back to the the way we were structuring the the level design of the game so on the one hand it's it there is no engineering curriculum in the US public school system there's there's no we we picked one that schools can opt into and we sort of went with their guidelines but no school is actually testing this afterwards so what we had to do is make the test internal to the game itself and so we could design if we were designing each level to and teach one concept then if a kid passes that level we can say that they've at least learned that idea as they continue to apply that again and again and again throughout the rest of the experience we gain more and more evidence that they actually have understood that concept and are able to apply it in a multitude of other scenarios so by designing our learning assessment into the experience itself we

can actually just look at the game and say like this is what we've taught kids along those lines every level is designed to actually force the kids to re-engineer their Rovers to actually analyze this is what's going wrong this is why I can't finish this part of the level and to change it and so the core of what we're teaching isn't oh they figured out that I have to go around to these rocks what we're teaching them is that oh this is how you analyze a problem this is how you come up with a solution and sometimes that involves just trying some things and so every level that they go through we can actually say they've gone through a full engineering cycle of testing hypothesis and then finding a solution and so we can use that as our core metric last set to add to that is that the facilitator team actually run a pre and post curriculum experience with their classrooms to help help them like reabsorb it and reinforce what it is that they want them to take away from it just last question do you guys have any learning scientists in your design team yes we did have them coming in and out

oh they're not always staff two full-time she asks a lot of what I was going to ask well I'll piggyback on this and ask if you've had feedback from the the classroom teachers comparing the the students who went through there your program and and their learning experience and how they respond after the experience in the classroom versus kids who had if there if they had given you feedback on any difference that they had noticed we don't have direct feedback like of what you're asking yet this is still pretty early and so the sample of data that we showed at the end is it's a much smaller group than the total kid number of kids that we've reached so we're still working on actually collecting that data at the time when we when we did go to the school in in DC we kind of got there early but before we knew where the bus was and as we were waiting you know a

science teacher took us under her wing but then she started introducing us to every single teacher we passed in the school and the like social studies teachers were like I want to get on this bus my students need to see this they may not be in a science class but like just seeing the organic demand right thing when it was in a school was was really quite amazing post the post experience comments feedback would be really helpful I think going forward yeah and that's kind of where I'm going you've developed a wonderful thing but in essence it's a field trip and like you said motivating one of these students the experience with Tonya is the fact that she started a little child with resources and so where you wanted to go eventually cuz you're like having the experience the kids get off this bus they still don't have access to resources and so what my challenge would be is all those companies involved would be school business partnerships to follow these kids and possibly get continue to get those resources into those hands these are all schools that Verizon innovative learning puts a lot

of like additional support I understand that but you have a whole lot of other companies that could do business school business partnerships for that purpose yes for sure yeah thank you you mentioned working with a very multidisciplinary team scientists software engineers educators how do you make sure that everyone's on the same page despite your disparate fields what doesn't that communication look like so with a team this size which in this case I think we consider a luxury we all were sitting in the same room so if you know I were trying to design a new changing designs to our mechanics or something I could just turn around and say hey I need a minute like can we talk about this for a second and you can achieve cohesion really really quickly that way and that's sort of why we think it's important to have small teams that are all sitting in the same place is because you can you can maintain that cohesion and really let people working together and get that cross-pollination of ideas really quickly thank you I am do you

define the skills that children learn the exact skills so maybe like problem solving and do you have like also metrics for for this so the the metrics that we have at the moment so again we are still building out our ability to get feedback on our end or what we what we were sharing before okay thanks a great work really appreciated the presentation thank you very much I work with a lot of high school students in after-school programs here's to hear any thoughts tips or best practices you have with regard to on the one hand really building an awesome engaging game on the one hand versus you know the dopamine explosion and potentially negative addictive elements

of games sometimes that are being grappled with as well yeah that's a great question I think it I I would say it in in the case of the bus we erred on the side of picking things that you actually see across media so we were relying on you know like the hero's journey is what we built the story on and you're worried about less about like flashy graphics and moat like little moments of reward and more inspiring that sense of wonder in kids and that those ideas don't really have a one-to-one relationship with necessarily the kinds of game design that you're talking about so we for in this case like a lot of that stuff never came up like there is never a need for instilling like a leaderboard in installing a leaderboard in the game or like getting kids to really start thinking about this in terms of like points and badges what they're really

excited about is that moment when you know the the subwoofer that's under each of their seats starts rattling the whole bus because they're taking off or when we actually get to like do a wipe and suddenly they're looking down on Jupiter or like this the player investment is a huge one that you can you can pull on to actually like create the experience you're talking about just the the fact that I designed a thing here and now it's over there on a big screen driving out onto the surface of Mars like that sort of thing really gets kids were very very excited so I would say if you design a compelling experience first and then worry about the game design a little later which I know at this conference is sort of like whoa what are you saying but the experience is what you want the kids to have and the game facilitates that so I think if you go in that order you will arrive at a game that gets across what you want awesome your presentation definitely sparked a sense of wonder thank you very very much okay I'm gonna shout hello probably no I'm

gonna ask was accessibility considered so the well there there are a number of ways that accessibility comes into the bus I've learned a lot this conference thanks to Chery the the black box on the back of the text on the subtitles as part of that so the bus is wheelchair accessible and unfortunately we weren't able to design through the problem of like if there's a student who's blind on the bus I'm so much of the experience is visual but the way we designed the game doesn't rely on a knowledge of reading or great familiarity with the English language most of its taught through either well the only moment that we actually directly teach is taught through visual stimuli and then from there the kids just experiment so we're actually not relying on them coming in

with a lot of resources behind them with the kid that was frustrated and through through the pad by seeing that perhaps that helped you by seeing that in person seeing that kind of like physical frustration which is often characteristic of kids with ADHD or autism that kind of thing perhaps you accidentally stepped into that realm of of making a more accessible experience so I applaud you for working with the kids so early on I think it's awesome thank also if there are no more questions oh one more I think we have two minutes thanks for the great work in a presentation III question is a kind of exploration and research did you guys do before you landed on this bus and the game design concept so the

rendering you saw at the beginning of the attack there was a whole phase of work before we came on to actually just design the student experience and that that was a I believe it was a 13 week project that involved actually doing that background research figuring out what kids would find exciting what we could actually put on a bus because I think the bus was actually always part of that but that research was done in an earlier phase of work and we were handed a brief of here's the learning goals the rough outline of the experience now go design the game yeah the very initial concept was to have a mobile maker lab like with 3d printers and such and I think by going to aquariums and many art installations it's slowly pivoted in this more fully digital immersive experience in our research the one thing we did do was bring in wim hof the Iceman and we took ten-minute ice baths basically with our clients to kind

of like realize that the like big step into an extreme of not only like what would it be like to be on an extreme environment but to kind of make a big commitment to figuring this out so the make ins the making face were searching week C and the research face before this were deserting wakes how many early concepts did you guys develop before you decide this is why you're gonna move forward with on the bus and student experience itself it starts with like many many concepts in like post-it notes and very sketch style scale once by the time it got to fully like highly highly well envisioned concepts they're about three that were Dan selected in partnership with the client and then at the end of that phase they prototyped in like big foam core walked through experience renders like the ones you just saw thank

you very much mm-hmm my my question is how do you design around the 30-minute time delay when sending directions to Mars and back we didn't actually we put the kids on the bus so the bus goes to Mars so the time delay is just the distance between them and the Rovers which is the time delay that we're speaking at so we travel faster than light and go all the way to Mars in about five minutes and then we actually go all the way to Pluto and back to Mars in about five minutes and then let them drive their Rovers in real time thank you question yeah we had some significant debates at that one okay awesome thank you