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Fun Facts
This project builds off the popular movie, "Chicken Run," to engage their target audience in doing math drills.
Design Challenge
In the year 2000, Chicken Run (a clay-mation movie from Aardman Studios) caught the fancy of the young and old when it portrayed life in a chicken pen and the perils that its inhabitants faced. There was action, adventure and even some drama as each feathered creature shared their fears as well as their hopes and dreams of finding life beyond the coop.
Unfortunately, that level of excitement is not typically associated with elementary math classrooms. Let's face it. Spending time doing addition, subtraction and other math drills is not exactly a nine-year old's definition of "fun." Sure, colorful workbooks and manipulatives are popular tools that have kept kids engaged. But after spending 6-8 hours in school for 5 days each week, the average child would rather play or watch television. (So would the average adult, but that's another story.) Five students at Drexel University's Game Design: Educational Games coursedecided to capitalize on Chicken Run's popularity and mass appeal and use it as the context for their project, appropriately named The Eggscape from Tweedy's Farm.
Context/Client
The movie Chicken Run provided the context, story and characters for the game. But The Eggscape from Tweedy's Farmhad a larger educational goal: to reinforce third and fourth graders' mathematical understanding of graphing, operations as well as pattern and shape recognition. It was created for use in school and at home to reinforce and complement elementary math and geometry learning.
According to creator Jasper Zhang, the group struggled with having to anticipate the learning skills of the age group. "It was hard for me to get my head around what it must be like to be that young again at first but it resolved itself."
Approach
Using the traditional drill & practice framework, The Eggscape from Tweedy's Farmprovided 4 mathematical challenges to reinforce users' understanding of plotting coordinates on a two-diemnsional graph, number operations and mapping shapes onto a geometric pattern. Higher levels require users to work with more complex numbers (i.e., fractions or decimals instead of whole numbers) as a way to increase difficulty. Activities, or mini-games as the team refered to them, were intended to beused in progression or as standalone activities.
Testing
Information currently not available.
Team
The team consisted of a math major and several computer scientists, but in general, members drew from relevant experiences. Sholomo Avigdor's military background supposedly came in very handy in getting organized. Jasper Zhang took charge of graphics. Rebekah Isaakhandled the math content and final writing, while Yankang Guo and Reggie Granados contributed to technical writing and other details. Despite their "divide-and-conquer" tactics, the team was not spared from conflict. In fact, half the team wanted to make the project extremely detail oriented and the other half was content with more of an overview approach. Consequently, the group met weekly in order to discuss the concepts and track individual assignments. Work was divided up and completed individually and then later pieced together to create a coherent whole. As the course instructor commented on the team's dynamics, "Good communication and interaction between team members. Good balance of diverse perspectives."
Looking Back & Moving Forward
As the taskmaster for graphics, it is not surprising that the impact on Jasper Zhang had most to do with game design. He commented that the project helped him see behind the design of visualizations and other game like interactive graphics applications, which applies to his interest in information visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI) and interactivity design. And moving beyond the classroom, "it also helped me think about how to interact with the kids in my church when I teach Sunday school." Jasper is finishing up his masters degree in computer science at Drexel University. He works as a teaching assistant and educational researcher for the department.
Rebekah Isaakfinished her math major in December 2006. Concurrently, she worked for ING in their risk management department - mainly writing and editing computer programs to analyze the risk of insurance for investments. Though seemingly unrelated to her occupation, Rebekah considered the experience to be "very enriching and found the material taught in the course to be thought provoking." She reflects, "I enjoyed the fact that the course was split into two components... one of which focused on simply game design and included many activities to help us think as game designers and the other aspect was focused on education and the challenges educators face when trying to teach basic math concepts to children in elementary, middle and high schools. I believe our instructor in this course did an excellent job of tying these two components together in a manner that was interesting and useful."
For More Details
http://trails-project.org/webapps/gorp/ViewCurriculet.do?id=53