From January 2017 through August of 2017, myself and another METALSs graduate student created a research-based interactive branching story that used learning science to help learners identify and demystify fake news on social media. During the spring semester, we worked as a team of four in Amy Ogan’s “Role of Technology in 21st Century Education” course. We researched learner behaviors, cognitive bias and trends in social media and fake news sharing. We interviewed expert faculty who research and developed educational games Carnegie Mellon University, and play-tested a low-fidelity prototype at the end of the course.
For the development of the experience, we started by testing and iterating a general premise to determine what kinds of universes and stories resonated with people in a way that didn’t induce psychological reactance and cognitive bias. For example, we explored using a world inhabited by animals that might separate the player from their own experience. We explored the fidelity of the outer loop of gameplay by surveying people about which genres and stories they found the most interesting.
Viral Resistance spring 2017 report
Over the course of an independent study in the summer of 2017, our group shrank by half and myself and my collaborator designed a more refined version of the story, incorporating multiple characters and a variety of information delivery sources. This iteration of the design focused on exploring intermixing and explicit feedback. Intermixing is the practice of including tasks related to learning goals, intermixed with tasks that are not. Feedback can be delivered along a spectrum for this narrative- explicitly shared as a response to an event, or implemented in delayed form later in the story.
We designed four levels that incorporated these two learning game mechanics in varying ways, along with a study design that would test it.