PathFinders

We created PathFinders, a physical educational game to teach navigation skills. We performed cognitive task analysis to identify factors that are difficult when navigating, and through a series of prototypes and playtests we refined our game to create the final product.

Navigation was an interesting subject to tackle in our educational game, since a sense of direction is not something explicitly taught in schools, beyond the skills of reading a compass or identifying locations on a map. But what are some strategies to help people get from point A to point B when they have never traveled that way before? Our goal was to uncover these and design a game that could teach them.

We used cognitive task analysis of high school students who had grown up reliant on a GPS for navigation to determine that a key skill in navigation is communication between people with different types of information. We used these insights as the basis for a cooperative game where two players must share information about their own position and the position of their partners' landmarks in order to help them find a goal. Through more than eight playtests we refined elements of the game, such as the amount of information allowed per turn, the length of turns, and the size of the boards.

Our final game is space-themed, with players stranded on an alien planet and searching for each other so they can fly back to their home planets. Through 40-60 minutes of gameplay, players communicate using cardinal direction, route distance, and relative position and move through increasingly difficult board levels before reuniting with their partner. Throughout the design of the game, we utilized the EDGE framework to integrate our navigation learning objectives, learning science principles, and the structure of the game.