• Group Student Project for an Intro to Software Engineering course at University of Delaware (Client: Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve)

  • Programming in Java & performing JUnit testing

  • Creating and editing game graphics using Adobe Photoshop

  • Researching estuaries and their wildlife as thematic inspiration for the games

  • Updating UML and Asana tasks

  • Regularly providing & presenting deliverables to the client

There is a lack of education about estuarine health.

The client, the Education Coordinator of the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, wanted a new way to advance environmental literacy through education and outreach geared towards kids (K-12).

A K-12 educational game about estuarine health, promoting estuarine stewardship.

The client wanted to accomplish their outreach goals by implementing a fun & educational game for kids to learn about estuaries and what practices keep estuaries healthy.  They envisioned this as a game that kids could play when visiting the reserve's visitor center for school field trips.

Our proposed game, Estuary Escapades, was created to educate kids about native and invasive fish species & estuarine clean-up.  We split our game into 3 mini-games to address these different topics and to keep users engaged.

Estuarine Wildlife

• We collected information about native and invasive fish species in Delaware's estuaries.

  • We focused on the visual appearances of fish as well as their eating habits

  • We ended up using this in our first minigame, where users could match fish descriptions to the correct fish

User Needs

Our ideal user is a kid who attends school and is in a grade between kindergarten to 12th grade.  They may be visiting the DNERR for a field-trip.  Some key characteristics of this user could be:

• Short attention span

• Attracted to bright colors

• Attracted to interactive elements (i.e. clickable buttons)

• Prefers concise explanations/ descriptions

• Needs clear instructions

• Enjoys being rewarded for their work

Alpha Prototype

We created this version as a functional Java application with basic placeholder graphics.  While simplistic in appearance, we did achieve almost full functionality in the start screen and all three minigames.  However, we did not create the quiz portion we had planned to add at the end of the game.  After presenting our alpha prototype to the client, we decided to scrap the quiz portion and focus more on making important changes to the minigames.  For instance, our third minigame had issues selecting objects when users tried clicking certain buttons and trash elements on the screen, so we had to make changes to our code to fix the selections.  In the second minigame, we also decided to only have the user play as a fish, rather than both a fish and a crab, to simplify the game overall.

Beta Prototype

Our beta prototype included the changes we decided to make after presenting our alpha prototype.  For the most part, our beta prototype was the same as our final product, with a few changes made to our third minigame.  We ended up adding more elements to the third minigame to reflect what estuary cleanup is really like, to communicate to kids that maintaining healthy estuaries is a big responsibility.  We also fixed our application to open in a full-screen window to match different screen sizes.

Hardware

Our final product was presented to the client on a PC with a Windows OS and with Java installed.

Software

We ran our final Java application using the Eclipse IDE.  

Setbacks

After presenting our beta prototype, the client gave us useful constructive feedback about our third minigame, which focused on using tools to pick up and dispose of all trash in an estuary environment.  The client expressed concerns that kids playing this minigame might assume that cleaning up an estuary is easier than it is in reality.  In response, we had to adjust the third minigame when developing our final product.  We chose to add more realism to the scenario by allowing users to be able to clean up some, but not all of the trash present in the environment in the third minigame.

Conclusions & Future Work

We were able to deliver a working product that allows users to interact with and learn about different aspects of estuarine health, which is what we set out to do.  We also gained a lot of experience programming in Java, writing JUnit tests and working in an Agile environment.

In the future, we would like our project to implement more refined graphics and animations to improve the overall user experience and make our product more appealing to kids.