Help the colonist in:
Mars Base
Imagine being a NASA engineer and having to help an astronaut on Mars who is alone on a faulty base.
This game puts the students in the role of these engineers who have to think up solutions that can be uploaded as blueprints using whatever is at hand.
The Lead Engineer (the teacher) might hand out LEGO, Little Bits or whatever the school is using in their STEM education. The students come up with solutions but the Lead Engineer has the final say and is the only one with the keys for unlocking the next levels of the (digital) game.
This project was invented and pitched to provide a context for using school maker labs. The schools involved had frustrations activating their students when they were in the maker labs.
With a thorough analysis based on an assumption that the maker lab in itself doesn’t motivate students to be creative, we decided to take a narrative approach to provide an engaging context, where the maker lab could be framed as something other than a classroom. It ended up with a user analysis where light roles for the students (NASA engineers) and a setting made them highly motivated for solving tasks.
I acted as Game director and producer and managed to set the right team for delivering the complete game.Mars Base gave tremendous value to teachers trying to find some useful context for getting their students engaged in using the school’s maker labs.
Working within a K12 context taught us new things about onboarding and how to design experiences for supporting specific learning activities without tying the game down to a specific curriculum.
Mars Base was built in Unity3D and published for Desktop but had support AR apps on Android and IOS
#STEM #Creativity #GameBasedLearning #MakerLab
Skills: Design · Project Management · User Experience · STEM · Design Systems · Unity3D