Exo-Planet Explorer
The game was developed as university project, in collaboration with Tycho Brahe Planetarium, Copenhagen. Due to covid-19 restrictions, the final product was not implemented in a physical exhibition.
A collaborative, interactive gamified educational experience developed for the Tycho Brahe Planetarium. It fits a variety of types of visitors and teaches the basics of exoplanet exploration and studies.
My Role
As a team member in the project, I dealt with varied responsibilities in different development stages. During the research phase, I focused mainly on gamification theory and design, Working to ensure meaningful game elements within the experience. I was responsible for stations 3 and 4 within the product in the design and development phases, from designing the prototype to programming and quality assurance.
Challenges
Gamification
The spectrum between game based learning to gamification is delicate, especially when targeting audiences that have been exposed to media since birth. All gamification elements need to be well thought and to have real and meaningful correlation to the learned material.
The design of our experience follows the principles of meaningful gamification framework by S. Nicholson to ensure a fun yet educational experience for all players.
Collaberation
One of the key elements of successful interactive experience is social. Designing our experience, we have set a goal to create experience that will encourage players to communicate and collaborate with one another both digitally and physically.
The designed structure requires collaborative efforts from the players. It will require Verbal and Interactive communication between them to reach the goal and cannot be completed otherwise.
To ensure our product will fit all type of visitors, there is a possibility to play in a single player mode yet the application encourages the players to find teammates to experience the product as intended.
Tangibility
To inspire users to think further about the topic, we inspired to create tangible elements to the experience that will serve as a contrast to the required technology to fulfil the task both in our application and in real life.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, we were unable to implement and test the product in a physical manner and in the intended form. We hope that one day we will be able to implement it accordingly within the Planetarium exhibitions space.
