Everything has changed, but remains the same
We are almost at the end of the Development Phase of the Community Tech Project. I’ve been absent from weeknotes with a lot of personal reasons, but here is an important one.
Over the last few weeks while we have being testing iterations of our server, we have been testing for the following:
Feasiblity
User Friendliness
Is it what is needed?
Is it what is wanted?
How will people use it?
What is their own ‘discovery process’ – that is, when presented with it, what will they do? How will they interact and what choices will they make, how will the navigate – is it intuitive or confusing?
Does it solve our problem statement?
Houston, we have a problem (statement)
This is the original problem statement. My solution was to build a safeguarded, supportive, nurturing Minecraft server for children to come and play safely and make friends.
Following the prototyping and researching, the plan has changed a lot. It’s not just about building a server. It’s about making the server accessible. In any project I lead, I am always thinking, “but who am I leaving out?”
In previous weeknotes I spoke about the adaptive controls for PC and eye trackers I have set up in workshops.
But I have always been working on the basis that the members ALREADY play Minecraft on PC ( we don’t run on consoles due to our bespoke plugins for safeguarding and game play). And that they know the commands.
So the prototyping we are doing now in the final push is all about accessibility.
Minecraft involves a LOT of typing and keyboard use.
Some players who want to be part of this supportive community find it difficult to join other Minecraft servers due to the fast past text chat, and need for typed commands and reading on screen instructions.
The young people we work with are exclusively for children and young people with SEND. Many take longer processing verbal and text communication. Some are dyslexic, or at an earlier stage of literacy than peers. The remembering and typing of commands has proven to be a barrier for some.
So Josh has designed bespoke menus for the functions that normally people would type. Some typed functions are replaced by NPCs (non-player characters) that you right click. The words are on contrasting colour squares. All can be accessed by clicking on an NPC or typing one of only TWO commands : /menu or /info
We did an initial prototype workshops with willing guinea pigs, and the result was an easily navigated session, with none of the overwhelm before.
Although it is just a wire frame protoype and there is a lot of work to do to make an Super Accessible Minecraft Group Gaming Experience, we are getting there.
We know what the end goal is now – its not just building a server – that’s the “easy”* bit – its making this server graphically accessible so that no-one is left out.
* Its not easy *tears hair out*
