Idea Lab

There are a couple of new things happening in our research group. Just a quick reminder first: we had an outside contractor for our mini-games idea that we decided to part with, and then we were also working with Distill Interactive for a game-like environment.

In the meantime we totally changed approach and discarded the mini-games with embedded bit of information, and we designed a card game that, in my opinion, seems quite interesting. We also just finalized our decision of assigning the development to a team within the University of Minnesota. We hope the proximity will make it easier for us to work closely and follow the progress of the project. The card game itself will have a board in which the cards are grouped by stakeholder in a particular issue, ethanol will be our first topic. The player is dealt a stack of cards with questions and will need to navigate through the board in order to find the matching answer card. We will also try to incentivate the player to answer all question because each question will provide a puzzle piece to be used after the game is over to compose an image.

On the other hand we have started the first round of test on the Distill game. This first round is focused on the user interface functionality, ease of use. Mainly it is a usability test to help us with the final tweaking of the game before we throw to the crowed to test if it's a good way to present a complex issue.

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**** Actually, the game is on-line, and if any feedback would be appreciated. here is the link** http://www.inms.umn.edu/games/ you can post any comments on my blog here or just send me an email at berz0012 [at] umn [dot] edu

I think it is great that we are taking two totally different approaches to the problem, and working with two different developing teams that are using different technologies and technical designs.