A Botanical Adventure in Plant Identification
The game Florist is a mobile simulation adventure game about learning how to identify common plants.
The game as a guide to getting started to distinguish plants allows the player to build a knowledge base of plants, learn plant identification, and learn more about the influence of climate conditions. The game mechanic is based on observation of plants through the DIY specimen cards process, including examining plant characteristics and typing names. The player’s job as a museum keeper is to fill the collection with new plant species and samples. Among the creatures, some of them are Medicinal herbs or edible, while some are toxic and dangerous. We follow the DPE framework (Winn, 2009) to design the game, which consists of four parts, namely, learning, storytelling, gameplay, and user experience.
| Date: | 04.2022 |
| Team: | Yi Lu, Aris, Matthew |
| Target Audience: | 12+ |
| Genre: | Adventure, Simulation |
| Pitch Slide: | PDF Doc |
| Share: |
Learners will able to:
It is a mobile simulation adventure game about learning how to identify common plants. The player plays as a museum keeper to fill the collection with new plant species and samples, and will learn their features. Among the creatures, some of them are Medicinal herbs or edible, while some are toxic and dangerous.
The game mechanics are designed to support successful learning which involves encoding and retrieval-memory in and memory out according to Dirksen (2015).
The goal of the storytelling is to lower the difficulty of understanding the game mechanics. It invites the player to be immersed in the game environment and enjoy learning.
The description of the story is as follows:
You have a museum of plants, featuring a huge assortment of palms, herbs, conifers and flowers of all shapes and sizes that you collected and identified.
Here are some wireframes of the game design.
The game revolves around the player as a botanist for the museum they are creating in a gameplay loop, shown in figure 1. The player needs to fill up the museum with plants (see prototype 1) so that it may thrive. To do this the player must enter the game’s map, shown in prototype 2, and explore the levels in the map, shown in prototype 3. In each level, the player will be able to view and identify plants. There will also be quests presented in the levels by non-player characters (NPCs) to identify and bring plants to them. These NPCs will also be there to provide some information to help identify plants. Quests from NPCs can occur both before and after the player finds and collects a plant. Doing an NPCs quest will give the player rewards, usually an extra seed that the player can use in their museum or unlock the new map.
When out in the world, the player will need to identify plants to end up earning them, whether on their own or through the quests. The identify mode, as pictured in prototype 4, will have the player make use of the info the character currently knows on every plant. By using identifying features, like leaves, roots, and climate, the player can correctly find the plant they are looking for.
Through the level design we can see where the player must find information on plants and use the general information to identify plants. The NPC quests will also provide the player with the use of the plant that they are identifying. The game also provides the player with how plants are identified and what it takes to identify through the journal.
The main input of the learning experience would be computer and game elements, including knowledge, assessment, aesthetic design, incentive system, etc.
The activities are two paths.
explore mode, enables players to explore the world, collect plants, identify plants by examining features, and exhibit plants in the museum.
where learners solve NPC quests, enables learners to look for plants based on features and receive rewards to unlock the map.
Self Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000)
According to Ausubel’s assimilation theory (1962), meaningful learning occurs when new information interacts with the individual’s cognitive structure that serves as an anchor to integrate the new content into prior knowledge. Instead of instilling decontextualized facts, we try to build connections between knowledge and provide friction to have learners interact with the content in the game, instead of letting information smoothly pass learners.
Constructionism occurs through the learner creating an entity or artifact, usually public, connecting to a certain subject to create a physical version of the ideas presented (Kafai, 2005). To do this, the learner should also be involved with the subject, not just studied in the distance, where the learner/learning is grounded (Steels & Tokoro, 2004).
Our game aims to follow these rules through its gameplay goal and sandbox. The player is given a large world where they play the role of a botanist for their own museum. The player’s goal is to fill up the museum with plants from around the world. The end goal is to create an artifact, the museum, where the culmination of their learning is put in one place. The role the player plays is meant to ground them in the learning as someone involved with the subject. The gameplay of using the game's notes to help identify plants also grounds the player and creates an individual entity for the player to put in their museum. The npcs also help create an immersion that what the player is doing fulfills a role that the learning they are using is useful.
People learn and practice skills best when they see related skills as strategies to accomplish goals they want to accomplish (Gee, 2015).
In our game, no matter whether players explore the world by themselves or accomplish the NPC quests, to achieve the goal of exhibiting their collection of plants and collecting the plant for people in need, players would practice recognizing plants by poring over the features. If they want to help NPC to collect the plants with sleep aids, they need to first speculate where the plant is grown by examining the plants’ growth conditions such as sunlight, proper temperature, moisture, air and nutrients.
In other words, with a clear goal and strategies, players would know how the practice and the goal fit together and why they need to practice over and over again.
We would like to make the game as a sandbox where players can practice recognizing the exploring different plants with mitigated risks and dangers, but still feel a sense of achievement.
If they fail, they can try again. The failure would be informative, instead of a final judgment of players’ ability, so that players are encouraged to take the risks.
As we mentioned above, the game provides two different paths of the game, namely, collecting plants in the world and identifying plants based on the features, or examining features first then looking for the plants in the world. Two paths enable players to get multiple exposures of topics over time as the first path starts with working on a big concept then down to specific features of plants (top down), and the second path starts with detailed features then comes to find out the plants (bottom up). The cycle of expertise allows players to learn new things, and meanwhile, to integrate the new and old one.
This game will have an in-game way to assess learning and we will also provide an out-of-game way to assess learning.
Our game requires the player to identify plants based on their looks and climate based location. To measure a player’s in-game learning, we will look at more qualitative measures. We will look at their use of the in game investigation and see what they are looking at. This will give us an idea of whether they know what to look at for identifying plants. We will also look at the time they take to find the plant they are looking for in game and correct identification. An increase in the player’s use of identification tools, an increase in correct identification, and a decrease in time it took to identify plants will be seen as the player learning. The player will be identifying plants and classification methods as the learning being studied.
For a full study, we will ask the player to complete three surveys.The surveys will ask key questions related to the subject matter, such as uses for some plants and what to look for for classification, and have players identify three plants from within the game. These surveys should assess the player’s learning for identification and recognition of plants, how they are classified, and their uses.
The players will first take the survey before playing the game, to assess current knowledge.
The second survey will occur immediately after they complete the game, to assess immediate learning.
The final survey will take place two months after the game, to assess long term learning.
The first survey will evaluate, then the player will play the game and be taught through its mechanics and finally the second and third surveys, compared to the first, will provide an assessment of the player’s new and grown knowledge, like in figure below
