by Morgan Summerlin, an undergraduate art student at Clemson University, and NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) fellow
For the macroinvertebrates.org project, I have been creating order-level arthropod illustrations. A few months and several illustrations later, I have developed a great respect for the knowledge of entomologists and scientific illustrators. I have learned a great deal about how to use Adobe programs, standard formatting for professional illustrations, and even insect taxonomy and identification. Most importantly, I have learned to view specimens with a precise eye, because no detail is too tiny to omit in an illustration! Below are some examples of my most recent work. by Tom Garncarz, REU Fellow Hello! Here's an update on my progress in creating an educational game to help teach learners how to identify different families of macroinvertebrates. Since my last post (which you can read here), I've decided on a proper design direction and have begun work on a digital prototype of the game. Before getting into it, everything below is in-progress and in-development and may not be fully representative of the final game. Game Overview deck link Design Direction After completing my pitch to the rest of the team, I received a lot of feedback on the direction of the game. There was a lot of positive noise about the mobile Tinder-esque card sorting game; team members felt that the primary interaction of swiping left or right was simple enough to easily introduce players to the game, while the anatomical questions were a good way to integrate the project's overall interest in teaching anatomical vocabulary into the game. Some key considerations were also made regarding progress in the game; if the game is to be used as a pre-test/post-test measure for new learners, how would progress and ability be recorded? Furthermore, are there ways to build this scoring mechanism into the structure of the game in a way that feels compelling and rewarding for players -- and doesn't fall into traditional gamification pitfalls in the process? With this feedback in mind, I went forward towards designing a digital prototype of the game as a means of exploring those design questions, while also building progress towards a final release. Digital Prototype Work on the digital prototype of the game, which is being built in Unity, has been progressing smoothly thus far. The primary interaction mechanism of touch-screen input to swipe cards left and right has been built, and the underlying infrastructure of allowing players to answer questions about the macroinvertebrates on certain cards is nearly complete. Once these two features are fully complete, work can begin on building out the scoring system for the game. I have already resolved that once players are able to fully identify a macro -- that is, narrow down their deck of cards to the point of having only one macroinvertebrate left -- they should be "given" that macro as a reward. This would entail being shown the macro full-screen, as well as some anatomical and categorical information about it -- order, genus, where it might be found in a water system, and so on. As such, the number of macros that players are able to "collect" and which ones were collected might serve trainers as a means of understanding what players were able to successfully identify and what they struggled with. Additionally, I intend to integrate a player-invisible scoring system into the game that tracks the total number of correct answers to questions versus incorrect answers. This would help to further contextualize each player's ability, and could serve as a comparative metric in a pre-test/post-test situation. Wrap-up Work on the game continues, and seems to be progressing well to meet the May deadline. There are still design considerations to be made, including how the game ought to respond to incorrect answers. Given that the prototype is nearing a functional state, I anticipate that I will be able to spend more time focusing on these aspects of the game in the coming weeks. Thanks very much for reading! Repository:
https://github.com/tgarncarz/macroinvertebrates/ Game Download info (Android) The .apk file on drive If you're on an Android device, install by simply downloading and tapping it. If your phone doesn't let you, you may need to enable installation of unsigned applications. Hello! My name is Tom Garncarz, and I’m a new member on the Learning to See project. My role for the next few months will be to design and develop an interactive game to help new learners better test their ability to identify macroinvertebrates and consequently, water quality. I will be posting occasionally to document my research and design process throughout the semester. Over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve been conducting secondary research and ideating on early designs for such a game. Given my unfamiliarity with macroinvertebrates prior to this project, my research has been primarily focused on developing a broader understanding of this domain from a scientific perspective. However, because I have the unique opportunity to teach myself a knowledge domain directly before creating a design to teach others, I can examine the materials I’m using to teach myself on a meta-evaluative level. The first section of this blog post will discuss the resources I’ve looked at, how they teach their content, and what insights I can derive from them towards the design of an interactive game. Research Guide to Aquatic Insects The first resource that I examined was the Izaak Walton League’s Guide to Aquatic Insects and Crustaceans. This book was recommended to me as a primer guide for getting familiar with the domain of macroinvertebrate research, and as such, it seemed like a logical place to start my investigation as well. The Guide is written largely in prose, and reads somewhat like a textbook. Different classes of macroinvertebrates are anatomically and contextually detailed, accompanied by black and white illustrations. Guide describes each of these organisms in terms of what anatomical features can be used to disambiguate it from similar-looking macroinvertebrates, which comes as a welcome feature for new learners. These descriptions, in conjunction with the provided illustrations allow for a high-level understanding of what features define each class of macroinvertebrate. However, because this resource is written in prose, it’s definitely designed to act as a book to be read front-to-back, rather than a field resource or a teaching tool to be quickly consulted. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it distinguishes Guide from some of the other resources to be mentioned in this post. Flashcards of Common Freshwater Invertebrates of North America My next resource was the Voshell/Wright set of Macroinvertebrate flashcards, a set of flashcards that detail 30 different EPT insects. Each card has a large color illustration with a size key on one side, as well as information about its insect on the other. This information includes the insect's categorical info (phylum, class, order, etc.), as well as what visual features define it, what habitat it lives in, how it moves, and what its presence means in the context of water quality. There a couple of interesting features of these flashcards that set them apart as a useful resource; each card has a size key, indicating the range of possible size that each insect could be. Additionally, indicating not only the insect's visible features, but also its habitat and how it moves, is likely useful when attempting to identify insects in the wild. I do wonder if it'd be useful to have some sort of visual indicator of habitat, however; it's difficult to visualize habitats purely from text at times, and in the context of a training game, it would be good to train players on stimuli as close to the real thing as possible. Leaf Pack Macroinvertebrate Identification Flashcards I also looked at a series of macroinvertebrate-focused Leaf Pack flashcards as part of my research. These flashcards are similar in structure to the Voshell flashcards, with color photographs of each macroinvertebrate on the front and descriptions and information on the back. The backs of each cards are less verbose than the Voshell cards, but they also contain annotated black and white top-down illustrations of the insect in question. Key characteristics of each insect are bulleted and outlined. Additionally, the set contains a glossary card that details macroinvertebrate anatomical terminology, as well as a high-level, generic overview of macroinvertebrate anatomy with annotated illustrations. The presence of this glossary card is the most interesting thing about this set when compared to the Voshell flashcards; since the client has indicated that they would like learners to be able to talk about EPT with the appropriate terminology, this seems key. A game should strive to incorporate this (though it does run counter to the idea of a more visually-focused experience). Macromania! Since my role on the team is to develop a game, it seemed prudent to look into other efforts to create games around the topic of macroinvertebrates. Macromania! is a game about water quality determination by identifying cards with EPT on them. Each card has a black and white illustration of an insect on one side, and its common name, class, order, family, life stage, and pollution group on the other. Students are tasked with identifying these cards, then understanding whether their presence in certain ecosystems (farm, forest, or city) is indicative of what quality of water. I'm intrigued by the idea of categorizing insects by the ecosystems where they are found; because the game focuses primarily on water quality identification, this makes a lot of sense. It's definitely the most comprehensive teaching aid in terms of covering the entire process of water quality testing; it does seem to lack a little something to make it fun. However, taking players through the entire process (rather than just focusing on the EPT ID) is an interesting idea that might be worth exploring. Electrocity Electrocity is an online game in which players have to act as mayor of a virtual city and make meaningful decisions with regard to how the city is powered. Building different kinds of power plants can impact cities' productivity and electricity output, but can also impact the environment. Although it has little to do with macroinvertebrates, and its scope isn’t really possible given the development timeframe of a few months, it provides an interesting perspective on designing an educational game. Electrocity puts students in a position to learn through these very high-level actions; building rapport with these concepts because of their impact on the player's city (something the player cares about!) is an interesting way to make players want to learn. I wonder if something similar couldn't be done for our domain. Research Takeaways
Based on my research, I generated a few high-level takeaways as reference points for the design of my game. The first is that some way to introduce players to the terminology used to categorize and define macroinvertebrates is important. Because most trainers (and indeed, anyone else in the community) will likely refer to macroinvertebrates by these terms, it’s important that my game help players use these terms to describe and understand the subject matter. My second high-level takeaway was that providing a context in which learners must identify macroinvertebrates is important. Although the illustrations present on the Voshell flashcards and in the Izaak Walton guide are great for anatomical identification, it’s important to show that these organisms exist in a real-life context. Telling players that these organisms are usually found in a forested area feeding on leaf detritus, for instance, will help with field identification, as learners who have played the game will be able to narrow down their possibility space to something much smaller than if the macroinvertebrates were taught independent of some local context. Finally, water quality is a personal issue; my game should make it feel like one. Often times these kinds of tasks can seem too heavily abstracted to feel meaningful (its impact on memory notwithstanding, the Greeble recognition task comes to mind). It seems important that players, when identifying different macroinvertebrates with my game, be able to understand the significance of what they are doing. Tying this work to environmental health is key to making the task feel important and meaningful, and will hopefully encourage understanding of the weight of the real-life identification task as well. By Bo Kim I created a matrix based on the 5 usability studies conducted with trainers from different organizations. The matrix focuses on the trainers' background, how they conduct trainings and challenges of training volunteers. It will be a useful reference to compare different training approaches of different trainers and organizations. Training materials from Georgia Adopt a Stream and MO Stream Team were also collected and uploaded in our shared drive folder.
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