Summary: Mini-Games for Students as a Reward

This is one of my favorite projects in my portofolio of work and one I wish I had more of an opportunity to develop out. I worked on four reward mini-games for an educational product that focused on practice and test prep. Students could choose between studying for a test via game mode or standard practice mode (question/answer). In game mode, for every question a student answered correctly, they got the opportunity to play a 10-30 second minigame. This constrained the design of the games to designs that could be "leveled" or games that played well in that time frame (sorry no MMORPGs). To add to the fun, we ran a company wide contest asking for game ideas and got a great list. A committee was formed that I served on and we selected four winners. The final games were an "angry-birds"-like accuracy game, a word jumble game, a pizza building game, and a number "catching" game.

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Project Outcomes

Prior to the release of these four games, the product contained 10 flash games that were built over seas. The quality left much to be desired but there were still a few popular choices. After one year with the new games released into the wild, each of these gamed remaiend in the top 10 list with three of them in the top 5. The most popular game being the Bug's Away topped the charts, followed by SI Pizza Co. It was clear that students were inspired and felt rewarded with the new games, and this led to the development of two more in-house games a few years later!