Evaluation: Round 1
As mentioned before, round 1 of the evaluation phase consists mainly of bug catching. Due to some last minute fixes to the game, there will be a slight delay in the release of the published build. The plan is the have the build and bug-report form send out to the psychology department by Monday the 31st. The close date for the bug reports will be Friday, Nov 4th. Our reasoning behind this was if evaluators are not given with a strict end date, they will often keep putting it off. It is important for the Cog2 team to be able to move forward in their iterative development process.
The bugs found during this testing phase will be crucial in order to execute a more usability evaluation. We do not wish for a user to get distracted by a bug in the game, and lose track of the purpose of the evaluation.
In developing an evaluation methodology, one issue that I have been struggling with is the following:
Evaluating the educational content of Caribbean Quest is an integral part of evaluating educational computer games as a whole. Initially, my scope of the project was simply to organize and evaluate the usability from a game development and HCI perspective. However, the more background research I go through, the less effective this approach appears to be. To evaluate Caribbean Quest as a regular computer game would be only looking at half of the potential issues.
Due to the lack of communication between the Cog2 team and the Psychology department, it will be challenging to arrange for experts in the field of education to be involved in the evaluation. However, to conduct a successful evaluation, it will be necessary to gain their minimal participation.
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