Rationale

Rationale

The emergency we have chosen to create an app for is a house fire. The aim of the app is to educate primary school children (6-12 years), how to be prepared before and during a house fire. We have created five games to be played consecutively in the order of real life occurrences. We decided that teaching children through educational games would be the best way, so that they don’t lose interest. Children are much more likely to retain information if they don’t realise they are learning. We chose to use cartoon illustrations, as they are playful and not too frightening. They will also appeal better to this age group. We used just enough text to be educational but not enough to be off-putting.

Tweaking

After talking to the tutors about our app we have made a couple of small changes. We have moved the home button up to the top of the screen and made sure that it is available on every single screen. This ensures that the user can exit a game at any time and the button is out of the way at the top of the screen so that it  is less likely to be pressed accidentally and doesn't get in the way of the existing graphics. This is how it looks now.

Another change we have made is adding facts after each game. Instead of the screens that said yes you are right or no you are wrong we have made them yes you are right because.... or no you are wrong because.... Therefore making the app more educational.We have still made sure that the text we have used is simple and easily understood by our target age group (6-11). See examples below.

Re-doing instruction gifs

We decided to re-do the gesture gifs as we wanted then to be placed over the game they were explaining. Below ore the new versions we have made.

We now have most of our screens on invision and are starting user testing sessions with friends and classmates

putting our screens into invision, starting to get everything running smoothly 

Site map

First draft site map including most pages.

This is the polished and simplified Site Map.

Touch Gesture Gifs.

After talking to Klaus, he pointed out that we had far too much writing explaining how to play each game. No 5-12 year old would bother reading this amount of text. He suggested we create gifs to show the action needed to play the game. Below are the gifs we made for all 5 of the actions.

Game Mock-Up Gifs

Because invasion is limited in the actions we can mock up, we had to create these two gifs that play the game for you just to show what the game would look like when played on an iPhone.

This first one requires tilting the screen to steer the character out of the house.

The second game requires the player to draw a path for the fire truck from the station to the house which of course cannot be done on invasion. Below is the mocked-up gif.

Smoke game

We created these screens to make the game where the character has to get down below the smoke and crawl to safety. The game will work in invasion by tapping quickly to advance the character from on screen to the other.

Character

This is our main character for the app. We wanted to create a character that didn't look too feminine or too masculine in order to appeal to the widest range of kids. The illustration style is simple and playful. We plan to base the rest of our illustrations off this style.

Lesson 5 & 6

During lesson 5 we mocked up the main screens in a rough way so as to easily convey our idea across for interim critique the next day. Below are screen shots of the mockups we created.

Home Screen, Clear a Path Game and Useful Item Game

Get Below the Smoke Game, Walk Don't Run Game and Assembly Area Game

High Score Page

After our interim critique in lesson 6 we researched some illustration styles we thought that might work well for our app and appeal to our target audience. Below is the link showing images we have found.

https://www.pinterest.com/boiledsweets/app-style-research/

Lesson 4

Today we were asked to outline our app idea including the emergency and target audience of our app, we then switched this with another group. The aim of this was to create 3 app screens for another group whilst they do the same for you. Below is the brief and three screens we came up with for the other group.

The ideas we received back from the other group for our app were a mixture of ideas we had already come up with and new ones. One idea we have decided to incorporate into our app is a game that teaches children the importance of keeping a clear pathway between their bed and bedroom door so that it is easy to escape in the case of a fire. The game works using the accelerometer so that the child can shake the device to clear a pathway to the door. Below shows the drawing were were given by the other team to illustrate how it might look.