Pre Thanksgiving Playtest!

Recently, I attended a play test event at Allendale Columbia School (http://allendalecolumbia.org/).  The play test was headed by my HFOSS teacher and we conducted the test to see how 4th grade students responded to our class project games.  Myself and MrNex (github.com/MrNex) showcased our game for a class of 4th graders, and I was actually quite pleased with the response we got.

The iteration of our game "Matter" that we displayed was a fairly simple python game written using PyGame(http://www.pygame.org/news.html) that involved a square that could move up or down based on how quickly the player was moving the mouse.  The game is educational in that it is meant to instill or reinforce the idea that molecules in matter move faster in a higher state and slower in a lower state.  Although the students did not completely get the educational part of the game at first, they really enjoyed playing.

We noted several changes that the students wanted to see in the game.  First off, there were several glitches that they noted, such as the fact that the player block would get sucked into the obstacles if there was a collision at a specific point.  The students also noticed a glitch where the player block would get stuck to an obstacle for a little while and not be able to move up or down.  In terms of changing elements of the game, we found that the students did not really see a goal at first, but when I started asking them how many obstacles they passed, they started to keep track and try to get a high score.  Due to this, I noted that we should add an objective, or at least a score counter in the game.

Surprisingly, the students did not say anything about how the game looked and actually really seemed to enjoy playing.  We had quite a crowd of kids around our XO Laptop which was great to see.  After the play test, we sat with the class and both asked, and responded to questions.  I was happy to see that so many of the kids wanted to either get involved in a game making field, or even just become programmers.  It was also cool to find out that the students have already begun making games and programming in Scratch(http://scratch.mit.edu/) at such a young age.  Definitely my favorite part of this experience was actually feeling appreciated for the work we are doing and knowing that it is going towards a good cause.  So many of the other play tests I have been involved in consist of allowing other college students to play my game and although college students may be more critical than the 4th graders, they don't seem to actually enjoy the games as much.