MIT and Game Design: Making Puzzles

With the story line of the LG2G game pretty much settled (see last month's LG2G Update), Scot Osterweil and his team at MIT's Education Arcade are currently hard at work developing the puzzles that will actually teach the game’s pre-Algebra content.

And how do you start making game puzzles? "We worked from a list of existing middle-school math curricula along with the input we’ve gotten from teachers working on the project," says Scot. "We're using the same approach that we used with 'Zoombinis' – we're trying to make puzzles that get to the conceptual bedrock of the math."

To do this, Scot and the graduate students working with him on LG2G, Kristina Drzaic and Dan Roy, alternate between group brainstorming sessions and individual work where they actually bring the team's ideas to life. The summer is an especially active time for the team because the graduate students are working full-time on the project before they return to their own studies in September. By that point, though, Scot expects the team will be enough of a "well-oiled machine" to more than compensate for any loss of work hours.

Scot says that four of the game's 12 puzzles are now in "various stages of completion" and that they touch on topics including proportionality, ratios and algebraic thinking. Even while the team develops the puzzles, they will also begin testing them by using paper prototypes with real live middle schoolers. That process will provide feedback that Scot and his team will use to refine the existing puzzle ideas and to create new ones.

The Education Arcade team is looking forward to having all of the LG2G puzzles developed by sometime next spring.

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