Session Information
| Title | Learning Learning Games: How to Effectively Teach New Game Mechanics |
| Presenter(s) |  Dan Norton is a founding partner and Lead Designer at Filament Games. He specializes in crafting educational game design documents and storyboards that originate from learning objectives. He is proud to have designed games about a uniquely broad range of topics, ranging from marine turtle ecology to legal argumentation. His games are multiple time CODiE Nominees and won the 2010 award for Best Educational Game or Simulation. His work has also garnered recognition and/or awards from organizations as diverse as the ACLU, Tech & Learning, The Washington Post and ecstatic children on message boards. He is a founding member of the GLS organization at UW Madison. He is a member of the advisory board of UW Whitewater's Media Arts & Game Development Program, as well as Herzing University of Madison's Game Design Program. He has presented at numerous conferences, including G4C, GLS, and UW Madison's Educational Technology "Brown Bag" discussion sessions. Over the last five years, Dan has developed over twenty games specifically structured around imparting learning objectives through play, and he loves almost all of them. Collectively, Dan's games have been played over a million times. Dan sees Filament as an opportunity to merge his life long love of games with his incessant quest to learn about new and interesting things. Aside from games and game design, he enjoys bicycling, baking, killing dragons with his wife and spending time with his incredibly stupid cats. |
| Time | Thursday, October 21, 11:00a-12:00p |
| Location | Ballroom |
| Format | Speaker |
| Description | While the title might imply a talk about learning games that have 2x the learning of a regular learning game, it in fact refers to the process of learning how to play a game that, in turn, is designed to teach. Good learning games, we contend, are engineered to make this process as smooth as possible. The basic premise is simple: before a game can teach anything, it must teach itself. An educational game without a high quality tutorial is like a nut without a nut cracker: you can't get to the good stuff without hard work and patience...two things people typically avoid and lack, respectively. So the challenge is to teach the game (the controls, rules, interfaces, etc) as quickly and painlessly as possible and, ultimately, expedite the player's access to the meat of the experience (achieving the learning objectives).
After five years in the business, Filament has crafted a variety of tutorials to teach an equal variety of educational game mechanics. In this session, we will demonstrate the champions that have emerged from the fray and discuss the iterative processes (including many valuable mistakes) by which each was born and refined. For example, session attendees will learn the difference between a "Madden screen" and a "tooltip cluster", and why the former is ideally suited for static interfaces while the latter is better for dynamic scenes. Attendees will also learn user testing best practices: slick methods for extracting and interpreting data from play-testers. Ultimately, Filament will impart valuable insight into the tutorial development process and deliver concrete, actionable tutorial design tips. Satisfaction guaranteed! |