The Empathy Stories is a digital game to explore one's emotions and develop empathy. Over the course of three weeks, going through a design process, our team worked on creating this game for the course "Games for Learning".
Team: Carolina Ali, Sue Magdziarz, Anahit Vardanyan

Design Challenge

Context

The Empathy Stories is a game in which children between six and eight years old can explore different emotions through storytelling in an app designed for an iPad or Tablet. The app can be used by kids on their own or with an adult.
Learners first interact with pre-made stories in the app to allow them to explore the emotions of sadness, anger, happiness, and fear. After the exploration phase, learners share a story of their own that describes a time when they felt similarly and can relate. The last stage of the app is sharing their story through various means. Learners can become a part of an online community to share their personal stories, read what others have shared, and give their support by reacting.

Children between six and eight years old will explore their different emotions as they interact with stories of other learners and create their own stories experiencing one’s emotions.
Learners will develop their emotional literacy by building their perspective-taking skills through understanding the emotions that the characters in stories feel in different situations.
Parents will be able to support their children through the process of developing their empathy skills.
Learners will be able to recognize their and others' emotions through storytelling, and develop perspective-taking skills necessary for empathy.

Objectives

Research

We did extensive research for this project as we wanted to learn about the developmental stage of the population we were interested in as well as narrow down the aspect of empathy that we could teach at that age.

Why 6-8?
Kids this age are developmentally where it is appropriate for them to gain socioemotional awareness (Cress & Holm, 1998). This game would timely support parents who want to support their kids' journey in becoming empathetic.

Why a Game?
Our research findings revealed that games are effective in developing identities. As being empathetic is a part of identity, we decided to move forward with our goal of choosing a game format. We developed the game to help learners take the perspective of others and develop empathy through the game.

Why Stories?
Cress & Holm (1998) point out that children’s literature is an appropriate method to help children through the process of developing empathy because children ages 6-8 have the ability to describe emotions and respond to others who they see in pictures and stories. The population is also intrinsically motivated to read/listen to stories. We combined gaming elements with a storyline following the research findings.

Which aspects of Empathy?
Our population of learners can gradually develop the skills to empathize with a range of emotions and take the perspective of other people (Cress & Holm, 1998). Based on this we chose to concentrate on four main emotions for younger kids

Overview

By going through two iterations, we developed a mockup of an app with the following features. We followed the literature on game design components presented by Gee and in order to make the experience personalized and game like we paid attention to having avatars in the experience who the learners could identify with, a safe space where learners can explore emotions in a non-threatening environment such as "Emotion Rooms", a way to reflect on the experience in the "Creating/sharing" section to make sure they refine their mental models, as well as for safety reasons a parent's app, which would make the game fun and at the same time safe for kids.

App Components

Creating an avatar

To make sure learners can interpret the experiences in the app as something that they are personally going through and have agency over the results, we gave them a chance to fully customize their avatar by choosing various aspects of the avatar from scratch to more easily identify with it.

Exploring Stories

We wanted to make sure learners develop a healthy relationship and understanding of different emotions, being able to identify, name, and reflect on all of them, but because of the age of our learners, we chose the four basic emotions, that learners could visit one by one and see how those emotions are presented and dealt with.

Interacting with a Situation

Literature suggests that learner needs to have agency and choice in game-like situations, where certain actions lead to circumstances. We let the learner interact with a certain emotional story and give a learner a limited choice of actions not to overwhelm with a choice overload. The Learner can see what each action leads to and have a reflection on emotional situations they deal with personally as well.

Creating and Sharing

Reflection is an important component of learning: To do it in a playful and game-like way, we decided to ask learners to reflect and create stories about situations that happened to them and how they reacted by either drawing, recording, or writing. This decision made sure we considered the variation of learners and their preferences to interact. The learners then are asked to share their stories and view others' stories posted on the platform to make sure the social aspect of the experience is taken care of.

Critique

Addressing learning objectives: While designing the project we made sure to base our work on literature, we are not sure that the process can actually address the learning goals we set for us in the beginning as we did not test the experience with learners and can only guess without that step.
Design Justice: As you can see from the screenshots that we created for the experience, we did not really account for design justice components from the perspective of visually designing the experience as well as co-designing with the learners. The project would have been much more inclusive if we included UDL principals while working on the design.
As the project was a short one, we did not have enough time to test the interactions or get critiques on the project. I have learned from previous experiences that testing and critique sessions are important to unveil problematic aspects of the design and work on them, which we could not fulfill during this project
Although we did a good job researching our population of learners in the literature and understanding what aspects of empathy we should concentrate on, we did not do a very good job of learning about our population by interacting with them or their parents in real life. If we had more time, it would be perfect to spend some time with our population and learn more about them in the research phase
The app is complex and convoluted at times. For the learners to have a natural interaction with the app, it is important that the visible components of the app are simple, while the complex and overwhelming components are hidden in the design. It would have been perfect if we had more time to make sure that human-computer interaction rules were addressed in this project.

What I Did Well

Addressing variation among learners: For this project, we made sure to give agency and limited choices to the learners. I think those decisions made sure we accounted for learners coming to the experience with different motivations and modes of expressing themselves which we made sure were reflected in our app features
Using learning technologies well: As this class specifically had a constraint of creating a digital game, we knew learners would be using learning technology to go through the experience we created for them. We did a good job at understanding which components could we leverage to make sure the learning technologies are well thought of. We ended up using the features of "safe exploration" for learning about empathy, which I think was a good use of technology for this specific project.
We did a good job working together as a team. Learning Engineering is a team sport, and we have proven this several times. During the design process for this project, we used the same approaches we learned during out MA program, to make sure we critique our own work, and remind ourselves about our objectives and constraints constantly. We were able to showcase our strong traits and complement each other in this process by making sure we constantly and effectively communicate with each other.
We created a good low-tech mockup. It is not easy to learn a new skill or tool while working on a project, where you need to use it. We were effective in using a familiar tool to create our mockup examples. We did not spend too much time creating everything from scratch, but rather made sure to use whatever we could find to put together to be able to showcase what we were thinking visually.
We were effective in applying literature in various parts of the project. Learning from others and building on them is essential, especially when you are dealing with a context and population you do not know much about. We were effective in finding resources about empathy, how to develop it and what aspect to concentrate on how our population of learners.

What I Learned

Flexibility is the key: For this project, we had to create a mockup for an app- something that none of our team members has ever dealt with. It is important to find effective and low-tech ways of creating prototypes in this case, and we had to juggle between learning a new skill to be able to create high-level mockups or spending our time on research and using the tools we already know and figuring out how we could illustrate it using them. We decided to be flexible and use the tools we already know and find ways to illustrate the mockups with it, had we gone the other way, we would probably have no solid concept, but pretty screenshots.
Learning from your learners is essential: I have previously seen how learning about your population of learners shapes your design. From this specific project that idea was accentuated even more not because we did a good job at it, but because I saw that our project did not change much from start to finish, because it did not have input from the actual learners, that would have shaped this project further.
Working with others results in a reacher design: For this project, I have been working in a team with my colleagues Carolina and Sue. Reflecting on the process, I know that the result would not have been as it is if not for the input of my team members. We were able to each use our strongest sides to make this process enjoyable and the end results in success. Sue was able to bring her ability to reflect on the literature, while Carolina and I brought in our experience with digital design to create visual interactions and mockups.

Next project

The Empathy Stories is a digital game to explore one's emotions and develop empathy. Over the course of three weeks, going through a design process, our team worked on creating this game for the course "Games for Learning". Team: Carolina Ali, Sue Magdziarz, Anahit Vardanyan