Amos Glenn - Portfolio

Design Challenge

The ENGAGE project at CMU investigated the problem of the difficulty of teaching younger students some complex or intangible ideas involved in scientific inquiry and critical thinking. Educational games provide an opportunity for young learners to "learn by doing" in entertaining ways. These games guided player to discover a scientific concepts for themselves, and then reflect on the process of discovery to gain understanding of the collaborative process of scientific inquiry.

There were few models for developing games that could provide this level of learning while also being entertaining enough to activate a player intrinisic motivation. For this reason, a significant part of the ENGAGE project was to assemble a cross-functional team of learning scientists and entertainment technology experts and find ways to bridge the gap between these two fields.

There was also a social-emotional learning element to the project due to the emphasis of the collaborative nature of scientific inquiry. The team needed to considered how to provide an in-game framework that encouraged cooperation in fair and intentional ways, while remaining age-appropriate.

A example of a test of social-emotional learning. The first frame is a child-like illustration of small person picking up a pie from a table. The second frame illustrates the same small person frowning while looking at the upside down and broken pie on the floor. — An example of an ENGAGE test involving social-emotional learning. The young player is asked to reflect on a short story centered on a problem involving emotions and relationships. The goal is to increase the child's ability to recognize emotions only implied in the story and to find more solutions to this type of problem, especially solutions where the child holds themselves accountable. These social-emotional skills are important for collaborative scientific inquiry.

Design Challenge

Instructional Design Solutions

Educational games provide an opportunity to engage learners, reinforce scientific concepts, and promote discovery-based learning. As part of the interdisciplanary ENAGE team, I designed and developed games that use instructional strategies, interactive problem-solving, and scaffolded learning mechanics to teach scientific principles and critical thinking skills.

A screenshot of the Rumble Blocks game, showing a level where the player must build a platform for a flying saucer.

Three ENGAGE Project Games: Three complete games were developed by the team to teach principles of balance and stability as well as collaborative scientific inquiry. In-classroom tests showed the games had significant effects on social-emotional learn and subject learning.

A screenshot of the Beanstalk game, showing a level where the player must build a beanstalk to reach a cloud.

A screenshot of the Teeter-Totter-Go game, showing a level where the player must balance a long to cross a river.

My Role

In addition to contributing to the design of individual games, one of my most import constributions was bridging the gap between disciplines in the team. The ENGAGE project was a collaboration between two Carnegie Mellon University departments: The Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) contributed experts in the learning sciences (including cognitive psychologists, intelligent systems researchers, and instructional designers), and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) contributed experts in computer game development (including computer scientists, UX researchers, artists, and coders).

I served as an intermediary to "translate" each groups priorities, constaints, and mindsets. I enhance collaboration by:

Building a shared understanding of the project's goals and processes
Communicating learning goals and aligning evidence-based learning strategies with game mechanics.
Ensuring everyone understood each other’s priorities, constraints, and mindset.
Everyone worked toward the same instructional and engagement goals.

A table describing how each naive rule used to preduct the action of a balanced beam. — Level Design for Structured Inquiry Young learners go through a specific progression of theories (or "rules") when figuring out how balance works. I mapped a set of progressive levels to align game mechanics with each theory.

Level Design: Structured Inquiry

I designed levels for each game using existing literature on the progession of theories (or “rules”) young learners go through when discovering each scientific principle. The table above illustrates the progressive rules about how to predict which side of a balance beam will go down. Mission 1 begins with only levels that follow the first rule (“The side with the most tokens will go down”) but ends with a level that “breaks” that rule and confuses the player. Young learners then turn to the second attempt at a rule (“The side with the tokens furthest from the center will go down”) until the last level breaks that rule. That cycle continues until the full principle is discovered.

The game is designed to follow that natural pattern of progressive discovery, but to condense what might take hours of unstructured play with a balance toy into an efficient game that not only teaches principles of balance, but the use of a structred process of scientific inquiry to answer questions.

A flowchart illustrating how the observation log book interaction should work behind the scenes. — Log Book Game Mechanic Design: I created this flowchart to guide game developers in building the Log Book mechanic in Teeter-Totter Go (code named "Torque-It"). When a new hypothesis is needed, the game uses the log book to lead players through the collaborative inquiry process.

A flowchart illustrating how the observation log book interaction should work behind the scenes. (alternate view) — Log Book Game Mechanic Design: I created this flowchart to guide game developers in building the Log Book mechanic in Teeter-Totter Go (code named "Torque-It"). When a new hypothesis is needed, the game uses the log book to lead players through the collaborative inquiry process.

For Teeter-Totter Go, I created a flowchart to guide the entertainment technology team in building a new log book mechanic to lead players through the collaborative inquiry process. Players enter the log book when they need a new hypothesis in the game. The log book helps them review past observations and use that evidence to construct an argument for a new hypothesis. When the two players agree on a new hypothesis, they return to the main game area and see if this new hypothesis helps them make progress.

Instructional Design Solutions

My Role

I served as an intermediary to "translate" each groups priorities, constaints, and mindsets. I enhance collaboration by:

Building a shared understanding of the project's goals and processes
Communicating learning goals and aligning evidence-based learning strategies with game mechanics.
Ensuring everyone understood each other’s priorities, constraints, and mindset.
Everyone worked toward the same instructional and engagement goals.

Level Design: Structured Inquiry

The Games

Rumble Blocks

A screenshot of a game set in an alien world. A flying saucer sits on top of a launchpad constructed by the player. — Rumble Blocks: Players build a platform for a flying saucer that must withstand the dramatic shaking that happens when the ship attempts to launch.

Rumble Blocks is a physics-based game where learners experiment building with shapes while helping an alien build a launch platform for a spaceship.

I designed progressively challenging levels that facilitated the learner’s own “discovery” of engineering principles like stability and weight distribution.

Afterwards, younger learners could not always articulate these principles, but could use them effectively.

A screenshot the flying saucer falling off the launch platform from all the shaking. — Shaking and Falling: Once the launch platform is constructed, powering up the platform causes the whole environment to shake. If the flying saucer falls off, the player must restart the level.

Beanstalk

Beanstalk is a physics-based game that helps young learners discover the laws of balance through interactive problem-solving in collaboration with nonplayer character (NPC) talking birds. The player must correctly predict which way the plank on top of the beanstalk will tip as flowers, bugs, and other “tokens” appear on the plank.

In addition to level design, I designed the NPCs interactions with the learner to provide scaffolded assistance to struggling players—on top of entertaining the player with banter. I then collaborated with members of the entertainment technology team to ensure gameplay reinforced the learning principles as well as the collaborative mechanics.

Teeter-Totter Go

A screenshot of a game developed by the ENGAGE project. The player is asked to reflect on a short story about a child who accidentally breaks a toy. — Teeter-Totter Go: Two player must collaborate to balance and tilt various objects to bridge gaps in the path. Communication and scientific inquiry are keys to success.

Teeter-Totter Go is a physics-based game that helps young learners discover the laws of balance, but also requires collaboration between two live players (not NPCs).

I designed a collaborative inquiry mechanic for the game (see below). When the players' current method of creating balance and tilting stop working, the game shifts to notebook interface where players record their obsevations, compare those observation to the current hypothesis, and form a new hypothesis.

A screenshot of the Teeter-Totter Go hypothesis testing activity. Players set up balances to see if their predictions are correct. — Collaborative Inquiry Mechanic: Players set up balances to see if their predictions are correct. Their observations are recorded in a notebook.

Designing Games for Learning
What’s Hard to Teach

Bridging the learning sciences and game development to help players grasp abstract concepts through inquiry.

Project Highlights

Translator Between Experts

Level Design

Designing from Data

Design Challenge

Design Challenge

Instructional Design Solutions

My Role

Level Design: Structured Inquiry

Instructional Design Solutions

My Role

Level Design: Structured Inquiry

The Games

Rumble Blocks

Beanstalk

Teeter-Totter Go

Designing Games for LearningWhat’s Hard to Teach

Bridging the learning sciences and game development to help players grasp abstract concepts through inquiry.

Project Highlights

Translator Between Experts

Level Design

Designing from Data

Design Challenge

Design Challenge

Instructional Design Solutions

My Role

Level Design: Structured Inquiry

Instructional Design Solutions

My Role

Level Design: Structured Inquiry

The Games

Rumble Blocks

Beanstalk

Teeter-Totter Go

Designing Games for Learning
What’s Hard to Teach