I and two of my beloved collaborators, Albert Dang and Stephanie Tang, joined this year’s Digital Media and Learning: Game Changer competition. Our goal is to design and build a series of game levels in Little Big Planet that have the potential to maintain players’ attention span and help them form active knowledge around geometry. We eventually won the first prize, Best in Class: Innovation and people’s choice award. We were awarded twice by Aneesh Chopra, the United States Chief Technology Officer at the time, one in New York during the Games for Change conference and the other one in E3 2010 for the people’s choice award.
Sackboys and The Mysterious Proof (Sackboys for short) is a multi-player game consisting of eight levels built with LBP developed by Media Molecule. The game helps players master the foundational principles of geometry. Like solving a mystery, each level builds upon the previous and increases in difficulty along with the geometric theorem being covered.
All levels are designed to be played in a living room without instructor co-play or any kind of supporting materials. At the heart of every level designed is our conscious decision to alternate active gameplay (play) with narrative moments (story). The active gameplay engages the players with puzzles that stem from geometric principles, while the narrative moments give them a chance to process and absorb the concepts within. This a tactic commonly used in AAA console game titles, such as Uncharted 2, to gradually introduce new gameplay controls to players while engrossing them into the story of the in-game world. We spent the majority of our time paging through textbooks, constructing a curriculum, defining learning goals, developing a core story, marrying gameplay with narrative, and creating paper sketches and prototypes. Visually, we built each level based on a set of defined assets that are heavily influenced and inspired by Tim Burton’s works. We also look into historical mansions and castles specifically in the styles of Neoclassicism and Gothic.
As a team of professional educators, game designers, and user interface and experience experts, we looked at high school mathematics standards on geometry and extracted the foundational principles that pertained to the relationship between points, lines, angles, and triangles. We also had an extensive, but casual, meeting with a practicing high school geometry teacher in Yonkers to discuss the successes and shortcomings of New York’s current day geometry curriculum. Post research, the team came to a consensus and made an informed decision to flesh-out/develop Sackboys as eight platformer/puzzle levels based on geometric concepts that define triangles.
While working to expand the scope of our project with the additional funding from the Digital Media and Learning Competition’s People’s Choice Award, we soon came to realize the difficulty in finding a single proof that encompasses all the concepts that we deemed essential to a solid understanding of geometry basics. As a result, the original one-proof-one-level concept evolved into a series of eight themed levels based on foundational geometric concepts that build upon one another and progressively increase in difficulty.
The updated breakdown of the eight levels are as follows:
- Graveyard (outdoor level)
- Concept(s): line segment, angle, perpendicular and parallel lines
- Themed elements in level: steerable handles, network of tree branches, spiders and spider webs, trapped earthworms, bone piles, crows, tombstones
This is the path leading up to the haunted mansion and where players are first introduced to the game’s back story. The level opens with a short introduction that reveals the mansion’s history and the legendary treasure its owners left behind. Players then cross the castle moat, navigate through the trees, shrubbery, and tombstones of the graveyard, and arrive at the mansion’s back door where they meet the spider mini-boss. In order to make the play-through experience more dynamic, we put in simple enemy AI and varied the terrain. The Graveyard level boss fight uses spotlights/torches to light up parts of an otherwise dark graveyard. These lights not only enhance the level’s visual appeal and accentuate the narrative drama in the boss fight, the rays are also used as devices to demonstrate how intersecting lines create angles. When players apply their knowledge of line and angle to maneuver the lights and attract the spider boss to a trap, the levels is cleared, and they are allowed through the back door leading to the Kitchen.
- Kitchen (indoor level)
- Concept(s): sum of angles in a triangle is 180 degrees
- Themed elements in level: pantry, mice, cheese cellar with incomplete cheese wheels, giant roach that shoots out collectible cheese puzzle pieces, cat mini-boss (that we affectionately named Meowser)
The core mechanic of the first half of the level is to collect cheese wedges of varying sizes, mix and match the angles, and fit them into the partial cheese wheels to make them complete 180 degrees. After some practice with the mini-game, players then progress to take on the cat boss, Meowser. While Meowser attacks, the players must knock out each of Meowser’s eyes and place the corresponding wedges into the triangular posts that support the crossbeam beneath Meowser’s feet. Doing so will bring down the crossbeam, defeat Meowser, and allow players to move on to the next room.
- Hall of Fish Tanks (indoor mini-game(s))
- Concept(s): congruency, vertical angles, alternate interior angles
- Themed elements in level: fish tanks, triangular fish, mirrors, ladders made of shapes, mix and match sludge monsters
This hallway itself is constructed of a series of puzzles. The goal of each puzzle is to clear a path so the circular fish food pellets can roll down to the hungry fish. Using identical in-game stickers, players can clear parts of the board by tagging congruent angles. There are fail states that indicate player performance, so the act of tagging is a meaningful choice with feedback for educational reenforcement.
- Library (indoor mini-game(s))
- Concept(s): ASA, SAS, SSS
- Themed elements in level: tag, mix and match book titles, librarian, book warms, moths, green lamps, fireplace.
In the Library level, books, ladders, sculptures, fire wood, paintings, and many more objects one might find in a library of the early 1900s are used to represent and reinforce the three different triangle congruence theorems: ASA (angle-side-angle), SAS (side-angle-side), SSS (side-side-side). The level opens with players emerging from a vault. They are then tasked to travel up an expansive bookshelf wall by pushing together rolling ladders of equal length to form triangular platforms of SAS congruency. Along the way players encounter the ASA, SAS, SSS bookworms that block their path. These worms will clear a way for the players to pass if they are fed Angle books and Side books in their respective order of preference. Based on research, a common misconception of introductory geometry students is the assumption that if all three angles of two triangles are congruent, the two triangles must be congruent. This mini-game is designed to drill in the fact that AAA (angle-angle-angle) is not one of the three congruence theorems. Several more mini-games of similar nature are seeded along the path to the next level, the Theater.
- Theater (indoor level)
- Concept(s): rotation, translation, reflection
- Themed elements in level: cranks, switches, stage designer, animal props made of triangles (like tangrams)
In the early parts of the level, the players must advance past physical obstacles (messy stage props), but moving the triangle into a position that will act as a step to a moving platform. In certain parts, two or more players have to work as a team–e.g. one player must travel across the room to activate a switch that translates/reflects triangles back for the remaining players. The mini-boss of this level is the Congruent-zilla! He emerges from the bottom of the screen (similar to the kraken in Media Molecule’s Pirates of the Caribbean downloadable expansion). Once he has fully emerged, players can then use cannons to attack from below. The only way for players to defeat Congruent-zilla is for players to cooperate. To load cannons on the bottom platform, a player must operate a crank that rotates a triangular cover that refills gunpowder. In the middle is a triangular platform that a second player controls and translates between the left and right sides of the room. At the highest level, a third player flips combo switches to reflect electric triangular spears to attack Congruent-zilla from above.
- Planetarium (indoor/outdoor level)
- Concept(s): similarity
- Themed elements in level: stars, projection, rocket launcher, fireflies, electrified objects, darkness, neon signs, similarity properties as a navigation tool
Players enter the Planetarium tower at ground level via an elevator. The goal is to fix the broken projector in the center of the sky dome. The level consists many small obstacle courses that are made of similar and dissimilar shapes. Players will have to make conscious decisions on where is the next similar platform to jump onto.
- Japanese Bathhouse (indoor mini-game)
- Concept(s): Pythagorean Theorem
- Themed elements in level: tile work repair, soap cutting, bathhouse clerk
- Chapel/Prayer Room (indoor level)
- Concept(s): SOCAHTOA
- Themed elements in level: sticker coloring, wave-like flooring, analogue to digital environment transition, statues, fractions related puzzle.
Four of the eight levels were developed to be revealed at the 2011 Digital Media and Learning Conference held in Long Beach, California, but only two were shown due to technical difficulties.
Sadly, one of the three founding team members, Albert Dang, permanently relocated to Hong Kong and resigned from the project in late 2010. Since then, we looked at different ways to trim down the production scale in order to complete the project. We omitted some cut-scenes and simplified the puzzles in the original document while preserving the core game mechanics. Based on our redesigns, all eight levels were published in different formats such as mini-games, tutorials, and regular levels. The redesigns still hold true to our original manifesto.
All-in-all we are extremely thankful to HASTAC and our People’s Choice Award supporters for granting us the rare opportunity to develop a budding idea into a realized project with assistance and funding, as well as bringing together members of the digital media and learning community with like minds and the common interest of furthering STEM education using modern technology via forefront platforms.