Week 10

This week was important for us to start bringing things together for our project. My job was to collect all audio for the game. As this is a game that is aimed for age four to eight year olds, we are aware that they will not all be able to read yet, so they will be unable to read the instructions, therefore will really struggle with the game play.

To help this problem we have decided to create audio for the instructions also, I worked alongside Marcin this week, as he was in charge of the dialogue for the game. After his research he constructed dialogue for our game Tiny Farm, he then sent this script to be and I recorded it.

Script for Tiny Farm

I used a H1 Zoom to record the audio for our game. I used a mans voice for the recordings so they would fit in the the famers voice. I got him to use an encouraging voice to help encourage the children through the game, even when they fail to complete the level.

These will be put into the game at a later stage.

H1 Zoom recorder

Recordings

MD2Final GDD

This week we made some progress on the development of our game. What I done this week was source audio that we could find throughout the game. I got the audio from a few different websites;

https://www.zapsplat.com/sound-effect-category/animals/

https://www.freesoundeffects.com/free-sounds/pigs-10067/

http://soundbible.com/1662-Farm.html

I got an animal noise for each animal that has been created for our game, so when the animal is clicked on the appropriate noise will be played.

I also found a fam ambiance which will be played when you are on the home screen to set the atmosphere and give the player a feel for the game.

Some of the audio files so far.

I have also been looking into background music for the game, and have yet to find something appropriate so I will finalise that this week. 

I will be meeting with the team again this week, Marcin is writing some text to help players in the game and we plan on recording these messages, as the players of our games will be very young and some may be unable to read. This will help these players. These will be recorded this week.

Game Design Document

Cartoon Farm Animals

I have teamed up with Esmee MacPherson, Nicole Goodman, Emma Byrne, Nhi Thai, Robyn Mulhall and Marcin Grabicki for this project. We plan on making an E-learing game aimed at four to eight year olds. Our original plan was to create a game with multiple different subjects to choose from. However after some research we realised that we have to be more realistic with the time that we have, and we have decided to make a maths based game.

We decide that we want the theme of our game to be based on a farm, as it will look colourful and appealing to kids as they will have learned about all different animals. Some of the games will include such things as counting shapes or matching up animals.

We have decided that we want to make this game as an app for an iPad because that is the most common device within children these days.

This week we all made the Game Design Document for our game, we each took a section and researched it and wrote about that in the document.

My section was sound and audio fx, so I looked into different sound effects that would help make the game more enjoyable for the child playing, we will have different animal noises corresponding with the animal. There will also be light and cheerful background music in the game.

Two games that we were inspired by for our game are Animal Crossing and Leap Frog.

GDD

Annotated bibliography

coggle.it map

Linked Open Data-Driven Contrastive CognitiveSubgraph Searching for Understanding Concepts in e-Learning

2018 IEEE 15th International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE) ICEBE e-Business Engineering (ICEBE), 2018 IEEE 15th International Conference on. :263-268 Oct, 2018

This paper is all about cognitive study and how it is a process in learning. New cognitive structures keep forming to improve cognitive structure and is benefit to understand concepts, this is done through assimilation and adaptation mechanism. This paper is aimed to help e-learners study concept knowledge better through cognition, this is shown through Linked Open Data-driven contrastive cognitive subgraph searching system. This system compares with existing search engines which compares with the concept that the learner already knows. This system is only the start of of looking in e-learning service methods, which will then aid e-learners in understating concept more profoundly. This system has not yet been applied. Prototype needs to be interrogated next into Silk 
Road Sciences and Technology Knowledge Service System. So that it will aid the help of learners to achieve better cognitive efficiency of related knowledge concepts. In conclusion this paper can only been improved with the knowledge of the learners and their feedback.

Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning

Richard E. Mayer & Roxana Moreno (2003) Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning, Educational Psychologist, 38:1, 43-52, DOI: 10.1207/ S15326985EP3801_6

Multimedia should be designed in specific ways that reduces any cognitive loads that is unnecessary. This is a huge challenge for instructional designers as to achieve meaning-full learning, it often comes along  with a huge amount of essential cognitive processing. In this article, there was discussion of nine ways to make this change of cognitive work, work load, with each load-reduction method keyed to an overload scenario. This research program has been running for the last 12 years, which has been conducted at UCSB. In order for this program to succeed they must depend on the understanding of how the human brain actually works, to show that effective instructional design depends on a persons sensitivity to cognitive load. Twelve years worth of hard work and programmatic research that has been conducted at UCSB , is shown throughout this article, with hopes to contribute to cognitive theory and building on an empirical database.

Constructivism and e-learning: Balancing between the individual and social levels of cognition
Hung, David, and Maish Nichani. "Constructivism and E-Learning: Balancing Between the Individual and Social Levels of Cognition." Educational Technology 41, no. 2 (2001): 40-44. 

This paper investigates into both individual and social constructivist view. Both individual and collective knowledge construction are equally important, as is understanding. Some learning based community environments mainly focus in on knowledge building and their goal is to achieve a higher corporate understanding.  Without a person having a full understanding in the community, an individual identity is not formed but only a collective identify within the community. Learning cannot be achieved if it is just at a social level, as it must happen in the learners head. In a community where each individual counts, each individual must go through their own personal learning, this creates diversity and everyones perspectives are valued. This gives way for people to depend on others individuality and knowledge. Within a community like this, there is room for negotiation and compromise. The goals of these communities are to achieve learning knowledge and learning how to learn, the goals are made very clear.

E-learning pedagogy in the third millennium: the need for combining social and cognitive constructivist approaches

FELIX, U. (2005). E-learning pedagogy in the third millennium: The need for combining social and cognitive constructivist approaches. ReCALL, 17(1), 85-100. doi:10.1017/S0958344005000716

Emphasis is being placed on students acquiring meta-skills and knowledge, shaping relevant, negotiated curricula, being involved in collaborative, lifelong, global learning with the help of real-life tutors and informants, a social constructivist approach presents itself as the natural pedagogical paradigm, in third Millennium thinking. Caution must be taken with regards to social, conceptual, political and pedagogical dilemmas, as time can be an issue. If high levels of fluency and accuracy are to be achieved in language learning, cognitive constructivist activities are something that may be up for discussion. With the two schools in interest complementing each other, despite being quite different, if care is taken to humanise and personalise automated activities, the best that is possible with current technological limitations. Doing this would explore in depth both static and dynamic technologies. Learners would be exposed to automated activities of a sophisticated class which would engage them in autonomous, predominantly cognitive and metacognitive processes, this would aid them in process-oriented real-life activities fostering psycho-social processes. The aim on this testing is to lead to a redistribution of scarce tutor time and better linguistic accuracy.

The Cognitive and Social Motivational Affordances of Gamification in E-Learning Environment

2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT) Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2014 IEEE 14th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on. :373-375 Jul, 2016; IEEE Language: English, Database: IEEE Xplore Digital Library

Motivational cognitive and social affordances of e-learning environment of gamification is the topic of this paper. After reviewing empirical studies in e-learning environment, it has been found that depending on what wants to be achieved that different game elements can be used for different cognitive and social motivational affordances. Although storylines are helpful as they can engage the student in their learning tasks,  they can result in students attitudes towards learning activities due to the limited integration. Another way to encourage and to cognitively motivate learners is to reward them with badges as the virtual agents will help to achieve attention and participation of the students. With this being said, it is unhelpful to rank students for higher scores on leaderboards. Gamification can be very rewarding for students as it creates social learning for individuals. “Gamification should incorporate mechanisms to improve cognitive and social motivations that enhance the course. Future work should develop a framework for gamified online courses that to improve cognitive engagement and social interaction for learners”.

Performance in e‐learning: online participation and student grades

Jo Davies 

 

Martin Graff

Published: 25 July 2005

 

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00542.

In recent years, there have been a huge number of reports regarding the beneficial effects that online programmes have on learners which interact with online programmes. It has been argued through many online discussions whether to not there should be promotions for student-centred learning. It is reasonable to suggest that the benefits of online discussion should translate into improved student performance. The study that is currently under examination is on 122 undergraduates and their frequency of online interaction, this is compared with their grades at the end of the year. The results showed that the greater online interactions did not show any significantly higher performance for students achieving passing grades. However it did show that within the students that failed their courses, had very little online interaction.

Multimedia Project Research

For my Multimedia Project I have teamed up with Nicole Goodman, Esmee MacPherson, Robyn Mulhall, Nhu Thai, Emma Byrne and Marcin Grabicki. We are hoping to create an e-learning based game, which will educate children in many different areas, such as English, Irish, maths, geography, history, science, music and art. The target audience for this game will be 4-6 year olds.

For the age range that we are going for here the game will have to be quite simple and easy to navigate, it also has to be fun and engaging to keep the interest of the child playing. We are going to look into Duolingo and Study Stack and probably take inspiration from those. 

We plan to assign two people per subject, so the workload is spread out evenly.

I look forward to getting into the project and seeing what it becomes.

Unity Tutorials

The first Unity tutorial I watched this week was a very short one, by Jimmy Vegas, just about bringing audio into your game and where to get it from, the first website that he talks about is 'incompetech' where you can get free music from Kevin Macleod, you just need to credit him. The second one Jimmy Vegas talked about was the asset store, which we are all familiar with. I want to go explore into different sounds and Audio to find out which suits my game best.

The second tutorial I followed was one about getting hurt and losing lives, resulting in the game being over. In the tutorial, Jimmy Vegas set it up that a spider could hurt you resulting in losing lives and the game being over, I didn't really concentrate on the spider hurting you and taking away lives as this wont be an element in my game, but I did learn how to create a game over screen, by adding a new scene, and this is an element that will definitely be featured in my game.

First Playable

This week I had some more issues with Unity on my laptop, after reading loads online about other people having the same issues I tried loads of different suggestions to fixing it and I finally got it working, however my older work had been deleted and I had to start over, so this week was more or less a repeat of last week for me, with a bit extra.

So I just had to re-create my terrain again this week, but I added in the features of my bananas being collectables, I more or less followed the tutorial in which we made the gem spin, disappear when being collected and make a noise, but with a banana instead. This was all I had time for this week as I had to do the extra work for next week, but I will be catching up on this early this week.