Game Critique: Keyboard Ninja
Basic Information
This game is called Keyboard Ninja, developed by typing.com. The website is devoted to teaching typing skills to children and has a whole ecosystem of typing lessons, typing test and typing games. This is a web-based game. The overall instructional goal is to learn how to type fast and accurately. I think the target players are primary school students who start to work on their computer now.
Brief Description
The game is adapted from a popular game called fruit ninja. As is shown on the home page, it has 5 different chapters of games: practicing only the top rows, bottom rows, number pad, or all letters. Within different chapters, there are three different difficulty levels, easy, medium and hard. Different difficulty levels have a different number of fruits popping out at a time. For example, the hard level has 4 fruits popping out while the easy only has one.
At the onset of the game, each player has 3 lives. When a player hits a fruit with the correct letter, he or she could gain 13 points. However, when he misses a fruit, one life will be deducted. Some of the special fruits are on bombs, once the player hits the fruit on bomb or loses all three lives, game is over. The purpose of the game is to get as many points as possible.
Learning Objectives
(a) Prior knowledge
Students are supposed to be able to identify the 26 letters, numbers and some special characters upon seeing them. Students should have already known what a keyboard is and have a basic idea of how different keys are laid out (This game is more like practicing than teaching from scratch). They are supposed to have prior experience working on a computer.
(b) What they are likely to learn
As far as I am concerned, players could potentially achieve two learning goals by the end of the game: type fast and type accurately. This is reflected in the design of dynamics of the game. Players are going to hit the right fruits in a short given period of time. Players will also have a better sense as to which letters are in which row on the keyboard as the chapters of the game were designed based on the different rows of letters.
(c )Transfer
When players practice typing in a particular row, he or she may also know how to type in another row even without explicit practice because the mechanism behind typing remains the same.
Within-domain transfer is also expected to happen: although players are learning and practicing typing in English, typing Chinese (roman alphabetical pinyin) or Japanese is also quite similar.
Hopefully players could also derive some learning methods from the game, like chunking and deliberate practice (categorizing all letters into meaningful rows and stick on practicing on a particular row), that they could well apply to learning other stuffs.
Mechanics
The game has 5 different chapters with easy, medium and hard difficulty levels. Each difficulty level differs in terms of how many fruits are jumping out at a time.
The layout of the game is on a cutting board and learners have knives in their hands. Players should aim at hitting the right fruits in a short given period of time. Once a correct fruit is hit, scores will be earned. The ultimate purpose of this game is to earn as many scores as possible.
Dynamics
Once the player misses a fruit, one life will be deducted. When the player hits a fruit successfully, he or she could get 13 points. However, some of the fruits are on bombs. Once the learner hits a fruit on the bomb or having lost 3 lives in total, the game will be over.
Aesthetics
(1) Submission
The whole setting of the game is based on a very popular kill-time game Fruit Ninja that I like to play a lot. There are some adaptations to educational purposes though, like moving some distracting features such as “freezing the time”, “blocking the screen”. It’s very enjoyable and pressure-releasing to see the fruit juice bumping out once you hit the right fruit.
(2) Sensation
The game plays a somewhat intense, exciting music in the background. Players could feel a sense of arousal and feel like they should concentrate more in order to successfully pass the level.
Learning Principles
(1) Practice Principle: Learners get lots and lots of practice in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success. Therefore, they spend lots of time on task. This is exactly how I feel when playing this game, I wish I could run round after round.
(2) Chunking mechanism: Chunking is a process through which individual pieces of information are bound together into a meaningful whole. The phenomenon of chunking as a memory mechanism can be observed in the way individuals group numbers and information in the day-to-day life. For example, when recalling a number such as 12101946, if numbers are grouped as 12, 10 and 1946, a mnemonic is created for this number as a day, month and year. Science has proved that chunking could optimize our limited capacity of working memory.
The game designed different chapters: top row, home row and bottom row. All these chapters group the seemingly randomly-arranged letters on a keyboard into a meaningful group so that it could facilitate players in acquiring this new skill.
(3) Deliberate practice
Different chapters are focusing on practicing different rows of letters. If a player continues to play a particular chapter, he or she continues to practice that row of letters again and again therefore become skilled.
(4) Immediate feedback
Learners would get immediate feedback on their job. Once they hit an incorrect letter, there will be error feedback message
Synthesis and Critique
According to the EDGE framework, learning goals, instructional design principles and MDA should be interweaved and related to one another.
Several drawbacks of the game is pretty clear to me. First of all, the learning goal is not quite clear: do you want the players to able to type very fast or very accurately? It seems that in easy mode, learners are only required to know where the letter since the speed in which the letters appear is very slow; yet in hard mode, the letters are appearing very fast, because 4 fruits in a row are bumping out.
Whichever the learning goal is, some mechanisms are not fully aligned with the goals. For example, if players accidentally hit a letter or number on the bomb, the game is over immediately. But is such punishing mechanism really useful? Learners hit the right letter, which is a good symbol of their learning, yet the game is over. Moreover, in each new round, players have three lives, when missing a letter on the fruit, one life will be deducted. But if the player types a wrong letter, there will only be error sound notification but no punishment. What’s the rationale behind this design?
One more confusion I have in for one of the dynamics design is the double point. As is shown in the picture below, I am not hitting the right letter super fast, nor is the letter super special or super difficult, but I am getting double points. What’s the rationale behind this design? How does the game decide when the player is going to get double points?
Third, is learning to type letters row by row really the best way to learn? Is the choice of this chunking design based on any scientific research? Why not, for example, divide the keyboard into three different sections from left to right and practice left section, middle section and right section?
In conclusion, I think this is a fun-to-play, time-killing game. However, in terms of the alignment with instructional goals, I think it stills has a long way to go.
