Newtoon is a collaborative project between Futurelab and Soda Creative that is designed to encourage young people to explore the laws of physics in a creative and engaging manner through mobile gaming. The PC-based interface is two-fold:

• the ‘microlab’ allows teachers to demonstrate and explain physics principles
• the ‘microgame’ allows pupils and teachers to create their own games based on these principles.

The games can then be downloaded onto mobile phones and shared around the classroom and beyond. Users are encouraged to share their games among their peers, and add to each other’s games - building on others’ knowledge and practice in an iterative design process.

Project aims

This project is an attempt to inspire children to become more science literate and to motivate them to make use of their own mobile phones for the purpose of learning. It also aims to bridge the gap between learning abstract science ‘concepts’ and ‘doing’ science, by actively constructing science-based games. The evolution of a gaming community has the potential to invoke an interactive and collaborative classroom culture with doing, debating and deliberating science at its heart. This will involve exploring the possibilities of a 21st century science curriculum.

July 2007: Prototype testing in school

On 13th July we did some final testing of the Newtoon prototype with around 15 Year 7 pupils and 1 science teacher at St Mary Redcliffe School, Bristol.

We ran them through the whole playing, creating, editing, publishing process. Firstly, we gave everyone a mobile phone with a set of games we had previously created back in the office - these are called ‘Gamestacks’. We then let them loose with the mobile phones for 10 minutes and observed any issues they had with playing the games. All the pupils really engaged well with the phone application (as expected, I must say!)

We then briefly showed the pupils their way around the Newtoon website and PC application a laptop - we showed them where the library of objects was (balls and springs), how to change an objects properties, and how to adjust the environmental settings. We then simply let the group of pupils use the software for 45 minutes to create whatever they liked.

A major worry we had before this testing session was whether we should develop some way for users to customise the objects and creations made in Newtoon. For instance, should they be able to change the colours of objects, or even draw their own shapes. However, we found almost immediately that the pupils were adding personality to the games and experiments they were creating, through the way they fixed objects to the canvas and how they spoke about the objects when we questioned them (some balls were “planets” or “people”, for instance.)

Generally the testing session went really well, but there were a few issues that we picked up around the language used in the interface, and also quiet a major observation was that the spring was not recognised as a spring by any of the pupils (we realised this was because it looked like a straight line and no where is the interface was the word ’spring; mentioned. So we took that one back to the lab as something we must change!)

The only technical issues we encountered were that the school’s wireless network was very unreliable, so we had to ensure we brought along our own laptops with 3G internet access (independent of the school’s network.) However, the discovery that the school’s wireless network could not be counted on did lead to the decision that we would run the trials lessons in an IT suite, on PCs that are physically connected to the internet - much less nerve-wracking for us.

It was particularly pleasing to hear a couple of pupils ask us if they could save the games they’d made on to their own mobile phones!

March 2007: Paper prototype testing in school

On 27th March we took a set of paper prototypes (wireframes) created by Soda to run some early user testing with 8 Year 7 pupils and 2 science teachers at St Mary Redcliffe School, Bristol.

We ran through 2 testing scenarios – one that covered creation of games, and one that covered creation of experiments.

Some very useful findings came out of the 2 sessions we ran. One was around the vocabulary used in the application - for instance, words such as ‘inspector’, ‘environment’, ‘token’, and ‘role’ were not fully understood in the context of the paper prototypes and the place in which they sat in the proposed user interface. Some of the suggested words to replace these were ‘player’, or ‘sprite’ instead of token; ‘target’ or ‘objective’ instead of ‘goal’; and ‘barrier’ or ‘enemies’ instead of hazard.

An expectation with a couple of the pupils was that they could set the aims or goals of the game they were creating on a separate screen (perhaps by writing the aim in text), rather than using the ‘goal’, ‘token’ and ‘hazard’ selections when assigning roles to objects in their game.

In fact, the whole concept of setting game objectives was a tricky one to convey, and this testing was really suggesting we should provide a series of dropdown boxes where users can specify game rules based around natural language questions about actions on objects, (for example, questions like “what does a player move?”, “what does a player have to hit?”, and “what does a player have to avoid?”)

The teachers were stumped when presented with a blank canvas – there was an expectation that when opening Newtoon you should first be presented with a couple of objects in an example experiment, to get you started.

Towards the end of the testing period, we asked the pupils to create some of their own games, based on the paper prototypes they’d been looking through, simply by drawing these on paper. This exercise proved really successful, and all pupils quickly took to drawing at least a couple of games, just in a few minutes – in most cases these demonstrated an understanding of tokens (or players) and goals, as well as hazards. One pupil created some really interesting games, both visually and conceptually, so I don’t think we’ll any problems encouraging pupils to create their own games once they have access to the Newtoon software!

Finally, we found that the pupils and teachers were very different in their approach to and interest in different elements of the Newtoon prototype. For instance, pupils found creation of games very compelling, and really weren’t interested at all in creating experiments. Perhaps not surprisingly, the teachers were far more compelled by creating experiments than creation of games!

February 2007: Mobile phone games workshops

March 2007: Paper prototype testing in school
On 27th March we took a set of paper prototypes (wireframes) created by Soda to run some early user testing with 8 Year 7 pupils and 2 science teachers at St Mary Redcliffe School, Bristol.
We ran through 2 testing scenarios – one that covered creation of games, and one that covered creation of experiments.
Some very useful findings came out of the 2 sessions we ran. One was around the vocabulary used in the application - for instance, words such as ‘inspector’, ‘environment’, ‘token’, and ‘role’ were not fully understood in the context of the paper prototypes and the place in which they sat in the proposed user interface. Some of the suggested words to replace these were ‘player’, or ‘sprite’ instead of token; ‘target’ or ‘objective’ instead of ‘goal’; and ‘barrier’ or ‘enemies’ instead of hazard.
An expectation with a couple of the pupils was that they could set the aims or goals of the game they were creating on a separate screen (perhaps by writing the aim in text), rather than using the ‘goal’, ‘token’ and ‘hazard’ selections when assigning roles to objects in their game.
In fact, the whole concept of setting game objectives was a tricky one to convey, and this testing was really suggesting we should provide a series of dropdown boxes where users can specify game rules based around natural language questions about actions on objects, (for example, questions like “what does a player move?”, “what does a player have to hit?”, and “what does a player have to avoid?”)
The teachers were stumped when presented with a blank canvas – there was an expectation that when opening Newtoon you should first be presented with a couple of objects in an example experiment, to get you started.
Towards the end of the testing period, we asked the pupils to create some of their own games, based on the paper prototypes they’d been looking through, simply by drawing these on paper. This exercise proved really successful, and all pupils quickly took to drawing at least a couple of games, just in a few minutes – in most cases these demonstrated an understanding of tokens (or players) and goals, as well as hazards. One pupil created some really interesting games, both visually and conceptually, so I don’t think we’ll any problems encouraging pupils to create their own games once they have access to the Newtoon software!
Finally, we found that the pupils and teachers were very different in their approach to and interest in different elements of the Newtoon prototype. For instance, pupils found creation of games very compelling, and really weren’t interested at all in creating experiments. Perhaps not surprisingly, the teachers were far more compelled by creating experiments than creation of games!
We went to Churchill secondary school on 6th February and ran some workshops to explore how year 7 pupils use mobile phones, play mobile phone games, and what they thought of creating their own games.

Playing games

The students played on a Nintendo DS (with the Warioware touched game) - this demonstrates the frantic nature of the proposed style of Newtoon game, and 2 mobile phones (with 4 games on). They played for 10-15 minutes - we noticed that they started to play games immediately, and seemed to be learning how to interact with the games based on educated guessing. As soon as a student had learnt how to play, they quickly shared this information with their friends by shouting out tips and physically demonstrating to each other how to play. It didn’t go unnoticed that they were all quite competitive with their scores too!

We gave the students the mobile phones to use over break time - a key observation was that they wanted to show phones to their friends immediately! In fact, all the students exited the classroom with speed and ran off in all different directions of the school ground – we lost sight of the phones many times during the 15 minute break! It was interesting to see that the games on the phones were not played at all, and simply having a phone was seen as prestigious (at this school students are not allowed to use mobile phones.) In fact, we had to intervene at one point as one of the phones was nearly confiscated by a teacher!

The students thought “good games” were mostly console or PC-based, and included things like i-toy, reality games (like the Sims and other games “connected to real life”.) They also said they liked “complicated” games and games with increasing difficulty levels. Other games they played were sudoku, cricket manager, football games, MSN games, PSP. One boy said he plays games all night, and one stated he played games and left his homework until the last minute!

As far as mobile phone games went, these were seen as having rubbish graphics, a fuzzy screen, and were cheaply made. None of the students really would go home and plan to play mobile phone games – it would instead be far more incidental and spontaneous. The fact that ‘better’ games (the ones that don’t come for free when you get a phone) are viewed as too expensive and too ‘quick’ – i.e. not good value. The students thought mobile games are a bit dull while computer games are bright and interesting. A good game needs to be simple but interesting, should be not too easy or short, and should be varied. Another important factor seemed to be Should have easy few controls.

Making their own games

This idea got a very positive response: “If I knew how to, I would!”. All the students said they would like to make their own games. The sorts of games they would make included reality games, and sports games. Their view was that everyone has their own opinion, and would make games to suit their own tastes and their character. One comment was: “It would be bad if you made a really bad game and everyone takes it out on you, but it would be good if you made a really good game and everybody was like ‘yay’ ”.

Games in school

The students thought teachers ‘might’ let them make games in school. They said that you could learn things you might have to know as an adult, and you would need to know how to make controls and buttons. For instance, for a football or rugby game you would need to know some science, like how hard to kick a ball, how the wind moves, how it bounces, angles, etc. You could use it as an activity at the end of a lesson, like something to do with that lesson that you could play at the end of the lesson, to help you remember it, to associate something you just learnt to that game.