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Technology and Connectivity
The inspiration for this development approach comes from the widely successful Jackbox Games Partypack.
The biggest innovation here is utilizing baseline tech that already exists in the classroom to allow for individual engagement operating within a larger collaborative environment. In addition, our gameplay leans heavily on analog party game mechanics that have an incredibly low barrier to entry in both the time it takes for a player to understand the gameplay loop and in setting up a play session. This, in combination with our local multiplayer approach, will help teachers to easily access the emerging citizens platform and get their students logged in and playing quickly using tech that is already familiar to both parties.
Our technical design is heavily influenced by the JackBox Games Party Pack, a suite of digital party games that are simple, fun, creative, and accessible. The Jackbox Games Partypack has a handful of different types of games with player capacity ranging from 1-100. Though gameplay hooks and flow is different for each game, all games allow players to connect to instanced game sessions initiated from the central platform with conventional web enabled devices. The player's do not need to be on the same wifi or bluetooth system, and only need to have internet access in order to connect. These web enabled devices allow the player to interact with the game client, either by receiving information or sending information, in a asynchronous gameplay loop. This affords a simple way players can connect to a single game instance together without the need of extraneous hardware that is typically not found inside of the classroom. It also affords the ability to create interesting gameplay mechanics typically difficult to produce in traditional digital games, but prevalent in analog games.
Web-based devices supported should include iphone, android, ipad, and laptop/desktop computers. Supported browsers should include chrome, firefox, safari, and newer ie.
Emerging Citizens will be a responsive web application, supported across desktop, tablet, and phone.The web UI for this application will strive for simplicity above all, ensuring not only high usability but streamlined responsive design and engineering.
Emerging Citizens will consist of game “modules” which are basically self-contained experiences, but they will fit into an underlying framework. We will be using the Socket.io framework (http://socket.io/) to enable real-time between client and server.
The larger effort of this application’s development cycle will lie in the backend/server-side engineering, which will power all of the gameplay and business logic, and figuring out how to properly scope the app framework such that game modules can share as much code as possible. The application will be an online-only application.
Emerging Citzens will be developed as an NPM module that will be installed and launched as a “site module” using the Engagement Lab Website Framework (https://github.com/engagementgamelab/EL-Website). KeystoneJS will be used to manage the game’s content. We will most likely host the app with DigitalOcean. Below is a breakdown of the technologies and software that I estimate will be used across our development stack.
Front-end/UI:
- HTML5
- JavaScript
- SASS
- Bootstrap
- FamousEngine (for animation/presentation work)
- PhoneGap or Cordova (for mobile app support)
Backend/server-side:
- NodeJS
- Socket.io
- Engagement Lab API (maybe?)
- Express web server
There will be two interfaces on the front end to handle a moderator/class (usually a teacher in a classroom setting) setting up a game that participants (students) would then join on a separate page or application. The moderator would display their interface for all participants to view on a larger screen such as a projector, so that players can see their own and their competitors’ answers.
On the other interface for the student players, there should be a very simple “join game” screen in which players would put in a code, unique to their classroom. This will be generated by the application when the host/teacher starts a session. Players would then wait until everyone has joined the session, and then be prompted to start the first round. The games themselves should follow this minimalistic design, walking players through what they must do in the game, and keeping input and choices simple. For the most part, players would be just typing in text or clicking links. The moderator’s interface would then display each of these answers as players submit them as well as display information relevant to the group (question prompts, timers, scoreboards, etc.).
The proposed technical deliverable would be an application that consists of a central game client accessed through either a web portal OR a standalone client that is downloaded as an application. Only one client would be needed per classroom. The Player's controllable UI would be housed in a web application accessed via a public facing site. the last deliverable would be a website hosting the project itself and includes session data tagged by location, classroom, etc.
Ideally there would also be a login system for both the client and the user, allowing the game to track stats/achievements for both user and class game session to record and archive created content that comes out of a session (ideally tagged by the user who created it). This would allow the Emerging Citizens platform to house this content for later learning and research purposes (ie. Students in a classroom in Boston played Wait Wait Don't Meme Me and all their memes are uploaded into a archived system so that a classroom in Seattle could look at what they made and analyze them based on their location, economic privilege, etc.).