Project Name: Up Your Street - Road Safety Game
Skills: Macromedia Director MX 2004, Photoshop, Lingo
Project (Video Desktop Capture):
Background: For my Interaction Development module during the first Semester of my second year of my Interactive Media degree I was given the task of coming up with an idea for a Road Safety artefact to teach some kind of safety message to an age group I wanted to focus on.
I decided to focus on school children around the age of 8-11 years old and my idea, which came to me after collecting appropriate research, was to have a fully working journey game in which a user could create their own avatar and then play through an interactive street scene until they reached their target of the Bowling Alley on the other side of town, they would then come in to contact with people and be given different tasks to perform along the way, such as a drag and drop Cycle Safety game, how to choose a suitable crossing place in the road, how not too use your mobile phone when crossing a street, how to deal with and use a Pedestrian crossing, dangerous bends in the road, which in turn would help the child to learn some basic road safety.
I then developed a functionality specification, flowchart and scamps of this idea before presenting them via a pitch board to my tutor; this was all done in a five week period and then the real task began.
I had to build a fully working prototype of my idea in either Flash or Director which would then be tested using a testing specification which I also had to draw up; I opted for Director and my final solution can be seen above.
The testing specification which ran to about 14 pages long in the end, contained a set of evaluator's instructions, which gave the person using the artefact a clear set of instructions of how to do so, an Observer's sheet, which outlined behaviours and user's actions that were to be observed and documented by an Observer, a task sheet, which outlined a number of objectives which needed to be carried out by the user (e.g. can you move from the home page to the instructions page and then back again?) and finally a Questionnaire which would be filled out by the user after using the artefact.
