Journal Entry 6.2 - It's working :D!!!

I'm really happy that I have gotten my project to work for the dress rehearsal :) I had received precious feedback from Donna, Audra, Scott and Sunny (all their comments/suggestions will be added to this blog). I know there are a lot of things that needs to be improved in my project and I’ll work on them this week. I really have to thank my co-worker, Jin Tang, who helped me to get this project to work the way that I wanted :D.

Observing people interact with my project during dress rehearsal made me realized that some of the functions such as buttons are not very clear for the user. Another thing that people commented was to have a graphic or illustration that would help people’s understanding of the serving size of the food. Overall, people really liked the idea and the concept. Someone came to me and said that they were on a diet and this activity would help them to control their calorie intake.

Nowadays, more and more educational games are becoming a fusion of gaming aspects and real-life simulations, which can also be defined as “serious games” (de Freitas, 2006). And this is exactly what I’m planning to accomplish with my project. I know it would be hard to have a full simulation game going on, but I’ll try to get as close as possible to real-life interactions. That was my idea from the beginning. When I searched about developing games, I realized that military, business, and social and health settings have been developing and implementing simulation games in their instructional programs. According to Cohen (2006), the gaming simulations are intended to help people to learn how to work through the complexities of different context. Thus, I’ll keep trying to work on the “Prepare your meal” game in order to make it to look/feel more realistic.

Reference:

• Cohen, S. (2006). The curricular role for understanding social decisions. In S. Cohen, K. E. Portney, D. Rehberger & C. Thorsen (Eds.), Virtual decisions : digital simulations for teaching reasoning in the social sciences and humanities (pp.47-63). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• de Freitas, S. I. (2006). Using games and simulations for supporting learning. Learning, Media and Technology, 31(4), 343-358.