Educational Game: Magic Cat's Word Kingdom

• Company: Chengdu Chaoyouai Education Co., Ltd.

• Time Period: 11.2014 - 05.2015

• Role: Project Manager & Learning designer

• Responsibility: Manage product design and development / Responsible for instructional design / Conduct user research and supervise product iteration

Background

Our team observed that kindergarten children need more interaction when learning English vocabulary, but the existing products couldn't meet this needs. Based on our field study in kindergarten, our team started to think:

• Why do young children sit quietly when learning English vocabularies? What if they learn the words while running about?

• Why do young children learn English vocabularies from books? What if they learn the words by interacting with real objects?

• Why are English vocabularies taught by teachers or parents? What if virtual characters play that role?

After four weeks research and brainstorming, we managed to came up with an idea: Let's make a word adventure game for kindergarten learners!

Challenge

As a fan of Toca Boca studio, I was dreaming of developing a product as playful and creative as theirs. Therefore, I volunteered to be the product manager in this project and for me, the challenges were:

1. What is the mechanism of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to engage children?

2. How to validate assumptions of the appeal of MVP?

Solution

Challenge 1 was solved by integrating Role Play Game with Learn & Seek Game.

From our interviews with teachers and parents, we learnt that kindergarten children enjoy playing those two types of games:

1. Role-playing game: Children perform the actions based on the roles they assume, such as the game playing house.

2. Learn & Seek game: Adults teach children the names of different objects and ask them to find those objects. For example, asking a child to find a basketball at home.

Based on those two types of games, our team designed the MVP. In the MVP, children act out different roles and start a home adventure. Their task is to find and save the trapped objects at home, for example, find a table and put the corresponding sticker on it. Then the children need to follow Magic cat's instruction to save the trapped objects, i.e., reading out a spell to free the table. The spells are the pronunciation of the trapped objects in English.

In the game, the virtual character Magic cat is responsible for assigning goals to children, instructing them to complete tasks, and awarding them (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The mechanism of the MVP

Challenge 2 was solved by making good use of Actionable Metrics. In order to validate the appeal of the MVP, I quantified the appeal as those three Actionable Metrics (AM) below:

• AM1= How many times do children play the MVP per day?

• AM2= How many days do children play the MVP in a week?

• AM3= To what extent do parents recommend the MVP?

Also I designed corresponding usability test process(Figure 2) and feedback forms (Figure 3) for data collection.

Figure 2. MVP Test Process

Figure 3. Structures of feedback forms

Results

With the solutions mentioned above, our team managed to develop the MVP and validate the assumptions of its appeal (Figure 4). More importantly, we improved the learning experience of kindergarten children with the game (Figure 5).

Figure 4. Highlights of this project

Figure 5. The game of Magic Cat's Word Kingdom

Wall of Gratitude

I would like to express my gratitude for the people involved in this project.

• My teammates Fei Tang, Lang Bai, and Zhe Cui, who contributed to creating and optimizing the MVP.

• My teammates Linlin Liao, Nan Zhang, Bin Lan, Jiahua Dai, Kai Zhang and Nixiang Du, who contributed to MVP test and production.

My words can never be enough to praise your actions because your work always meets my expectations. And I really appreciate that your made the workplace a fun and cheerful place to be! Thank you to all my team members.