The Power of Playtesting in the Classroom
landenlove.comFormer ESL teacher with a background in computer science, who bounced around a few countries and has also created ESL apps to help students with their English skills. It's a great feeling to be able to combine those two areas to help your students.
That being said, you hold (whether you realize it or not) a rather elevated position above the people from whom you might be trying to solicit objective feedback. Nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as you're aware that it’s in their best interest to heap praise on the game considering you hold their grades in your hands.
>That being said, you hold (whether you realize it or not) a rather elevated position above the people from whom you might be trying to solicit objective feedback. Nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as you're aware that it’s in their best interest to heap praise on the game considering you hold their grades in your hands.
This is true! This is why I never ask for feedback. I am completely silent whenever observing a playtest. Every change that I make is purely based on the problems I see my students and co-workers experiencing.
It is hard to do this when asking the question, "Was that fun?" But I try to answer this question by seeing player reactions. For example, many students think it's funny when all the bananas fall out of the sky on level 2. The original design goal for this level was trying to dig physics objects out of a pile of other physics objects. But the absurdity of that visual usually gets a couple laughs.
Nice~ related but if you want to look at what is perhaps the quintessential physics puzzle game series, I highly recommend checking out The Incredible Machine for inspiration.
It’s an older MS-DOS game, but its charm and personality still hold up today.
Playable online too:
> You see a crow fly into the tongue of a headcrab and die. You now know everything you need to know about this enemy.
But not everything you don't need to know, like it's name. That's a barnacle. But I still love the point your making here. :)
... I don't know how I mixed up headcrab and barnacle LOL. Ty for telling me.
> how powerful and unique this situation is [...] cannot be easily replicated
I've long wished for an HN-like community which combined software folks, sci ed researchers and creators, and teachers - to get tighter loops around "What do you think? / Could you try this?". But it still wouldn't be the power of playtesting.
I wonder how one might offer playtesting as a service?
> I want to target people of all ages and backgrounds
This opens up opportunities for guerrilla usability testing with adults. Though I've little idea what forms of it might fit culturally in Japan. In Cambridge MA, I could easily do street conversation testing.
Which still leaves ethical issues. One participant was distressed, "Disgusting!", and I only figured it out later... a (Powers of Ten zoomed) E. coli micrograph can look like poop.
> The importance of playtesting cannot be understated.
s//overstated/. Very yes. I've been gobsmacked by things which turned up in user testing. Example: a scene opens with a cartoon character reading a sign aloud... and the cognitive load spike (new setting + audio + text) disappears the entire event from memory. Literally: pause for feedback, "You should say what this is up front", hit replay, "Oh yes, this version is much better than the first one".
I think one of the biggest problems is scale. You need someone to analyze how people are experiencing your game/software. I think there are all sorts of ways you can get feedback. Having people screen record might be a good solution.
> s//overstated/ Oops! I will fix that. Thank you!
"ランデン先生Time" -> "Professor Landen Time"
Now hook it up to Claude Code in voice mode and let them add new features and change things in real time