CPSC 4160/6160: �Milestone 1 Presentation�

Alyssa Jones

CPSC 4160

Game description

Name title:

Readaroo

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Genre:

Education

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The player completes lessons and activities that are designed to teach them how to read, with an emphasis on phonological awareness.

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Game description

Game Objectives:

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As an educational game, the objective of Readaroo is to get players to develop their phonological awareness and learn how to decode words. Players who fully progress through the game will:

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1) Understand the phonemes associated with each grapheme

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2) Understand how to decode words and blend letters

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3) Develop the ability to recognize CVC words

Game description

Game Objectives:

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Lessons will be presented to the player, emphasizing a small amount of phoneme/grapheme pairs at a time. Players will develop their understanding of a given phoneme/grapheme pair over the course of a few lessons, developing mastery by the end.

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Mastery of phonemes will take place over the course of multiple lessons, with tasks including:

1. Showing the phoneme with the associated grapheme in isolation.
2. Introducing the phoneme and grapheme pair in the context of CVC words.
3. Learning variations of graphical representations of a given phoneme.
4. Spelling words with appropriate scaffolding.

Game information

Skill rating: 3+

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Players should be early readers, just beginning their journey into the world of reading. This game is designed with pre-kindergarten and early kindergarten students in mind. This game would also serve 1st and 2nd students who need additional support in reading. Players must know how to move and click a mouse (in the future, I would like to make this game portable to touch-screen systems).

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Audience: Male and Females 3-8 years old.

Game references

Color palette

Color palette

Entities – Kam

This game does not feature a main character entity as the actual physical person playing the game is the the main character.

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Kam the Kangaroo is the mascot of Readaroo, presenting the lessons and talking to the player. Kam communicates primarily with audio, with captions also being present as she speaks.

Entities - Other Characters

Due to the nature of this game, there are no enemies.

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There will be some recurring characters present throughout lessons, with various sentences and stories discussing these characters. They all have simple CVC names to make readability easier. These characters include Bob, Meg, Pat, and Liz.

Entities - Letters

For activities involving spelling a word, there will be letters that can be dragged into place. Depending on the activity, there will only be a small amount of letters (just the letters making up a word) or the entire alphabet.

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There will be empty squares to drag the letters into to create a word.

Game mechanics

• Matching Sound to Letter: Players will hear a phonetic sound and will be presented with multiple buttons of graphemes to click on. Players will be notified if they got the answer correct and will move on to the next question. If they get the answer incorrect, they will be notified of what the correct answer is and will be re-asked the question later on.

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• Matching Word to Image: Players will be given an image with multiple buttons with words to choose from. Same correction validation process as above.

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• Matching Letter to Sound: Players will be presented with a grapheme. They will have multiple buttons to click on, each button playing a different phoneme sound. They will have to select the correct sound. Same correction validation process as above.

Game mechanics

• Drag-and-Drop: Players will have letters to drag-and-drop into slots. They will spell words by dragging the letters into open slots. Same correction validation process as above.

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• Cycling Questions: Each lesson has a set of questions associated with it. If the player answers a question incorrectly, that question will reappear at the end of the lesson.

Player’s mechanics

All of the controls are done via the mouse. All mechanics are comprised of clicking, dragging, and dropping. This is to make the game as accessible as possible for young players and do make future portability to touchscreen devices easier.

Modules

Input Module: Handler for mouse events (click, drag, and drop); converts user input into previously described interaction events.

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Lesson Manager: Loads in lesson/level data, tracks and manages questions.

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Activity Engine: Main logic controlling the previously mentioned matching and spelling mechanics, validates answers, triggers feedback based on user input.

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UI: Displays questions, plays audio, displays feedback from activity engine, handles all visual aspects of game.

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Audio: Plays audio, including phoneme sounds, voice lines, and read words/images/sentences.

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Save system: Remembers user progress, allowing players to pick up from where they last left off.

Software architecture

Timeline

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• What modules are going to be a priority?
• Game Loop, Activity Engine, Input, Basic UI for Functional Purposes
• What module will be difficult to achieve?
• The development of lessons and the question bank for each lesson.
• What modules will be developed first?
• The three core systems of the game loop, input, and the simple UI

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October 25 - Core systems developed (Game Loop, Input, Simple UI)

November 1 - Activity Engine (Matching, Drag-and-Drop, Feedback)

November 8 - Lesson Manager (Loading Lesson Data, Question Cycling)

November 15 - Testing, Final Details (Animations, Polished Graphics, Voice Lines, Saving)

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