Managing Essential Processing in Games

Managing Essential Processing in Games

1. Chicken Blast Off, a Peg+Cat game from PBS.org

   • http://pbskids.org/peg/games/chicken-blastoff

2. Segmenting

   • This principle states that users learn better when the lesson is broken down into parts, and when the user can control their progress through the lesson.
   • Although Chicken Blast Off is a very simple game (as it is meant for young children), it is still segmented appropriately. Each exercise consists of two pieces -- first, where the user chooses the correct size rocket ship for the animals, and second, where the user builds the ship out of pieces by matching the shapes. The student can work on each part for as long as necessary to complete the task. The narration prompts you when you have been successful.

3. Pre-training

   • The pre-training principle states that students will learn best when they are exposed to key vocabulary and concepts before the start of the multimedia lesson.
   • Chicken Little does not make use of pre-training, perhaps because it is a very simple game. Mayer states that pre-training is most effective when the lesson is complex and fast-paced. There is a short intro video that tells students the "story" behind the game - why you're building spaceships for farm animals. I guess this could be considered pre-training, in that it does give some context to the shape-matching exercises that follow.

4. Modality

   • The modality principle tells us that people learn best when words are passed through the audial channel and pictures through the visual channel. Animations with on-screen text that is also spoken aloud in narration are distracting -- they make essential processing (learning what is trying to be conveyed in the lesson) more difficult.
   • Chicken Blast Off follows the modality principle. There is narration that is not also included as on-screen text. Students are able to focus on the pictures while listening to the narration. It does have a nice feature of being able to turn on closed captioning (see images below), but the on-screen text is turned off by default. This solves the problem of managing essential processing while also providing support for disabled users.

Imagens e arquivos do mapa