New Game on GameUp: Center for Game Science presents “Treefrog Treasure”
November 30, 2012
The Center for Game Science (CGS) is part of the department of computer science at the University of Washington. We’re made up of a group of designers, software engineers, artists, and students, including both PhD students and undergraduates in technical and educational fields. We have six games currently in development, and all of them targeted at different aspects of supporting measured and assessed learning through games. The Making of Treefrog Treasure: Our latest game is Treefrog Treasure. The game was designed to teach players how to place fractions on a numberline. The core group working on the game from the beginning included only 7-8 people, so we were really all involved in coming up with game design ideas. This means ideas were coming not only from game designers, but also artists, developers, and researchers in both Computer Science and Education. We went through a number of prototypes that were able to address our math goals but weren’t engaging enough for players. These prototypes included pinball-like games where players bounce/shoot a ball onto a numberline. Finally, we realized that a platformer game (think Super Mario Bros.™) where the character could stick to walls and jump into numberlines was the most engaging… Read the Rest»
