Playground An On-line Community Game for Children

Goals To create a persistent on-line neighborhood where children can go and interact with others in educational and entertaining situations that encourage basic math, language, computer and communication skills. To develop software specifically for use by children of any age which allows them the greatest freedom possible while still being intuitively understandable by elementary students.

Mock-Ups What follow are some rough ideas of what elements of the user interface might look like.

Login Screen

Password is a sequence of colors/notes instead of a word?

Chatting would be through preset phrases to control content and allow both speech and words to be used in- game

The game would have a 2d cartoony look such perhaps like this...

Character Options ● Character can be made by combining sprite elements for head, body, etc ● There will be no apparent stats for each character to the user. – Characters can learn skills and get better by practice, but it will not be numerically based to the player. ● Example: A character could be ok, good or great at playing the guitar. – Skills will have no impact on the abilty to do quests, they are just there to entertain.

Educational Options ● There will be options for different levels of math, reading, writing etc. ● The parents will set what their child knows ● The game will custom tailor the events in the game to suit the education level of the player ● Educational aspects are to be as integrated into the world as possible, not contrived situations that seem fake. ● Example Situations – Buying items requires the player to add the money totals in a simple interface – Calculating tax on sale items – Collecting a certain number of items to count – Writing articles for the local paper

Player Stores ● There will be a neighborhood street where the players can open a store or booth of their own. ● There they can sell things like lemonade, jump ropes, or books they wrote. ● Players can decorate their stores with custom sign etc. ● Items will be sold for some sort of currency which is earned by doing “errands”

Character Journal ● The game will keep a record of the child's actions such as who they talked to and what errands they did that day, what games they played. ● If their parents choose to this log can be accessed via the web as a journal, so the player can share their experiences with their friends.

Sub-Games ● Players can form groups to play or compete in sub-games. ● For example: – A group could form and have a box-car derby – A group could have to pick up all the trash a dog knocked over before the garbage truck comes ● These sub games would often be breaks in the continuous world of the neighborhood to limit the area the children can roam.

Story Creator ● One of the “sub-games” will be a story creator which allows players of different ages create a story with pictures which can be viewed on-line outside the game or turned into a book to be given to friends within the game or sold in a player store. ● The same interface can be used to create articles for the weekly neighborhood newspaper.

World ● There will be different “neighborhoods” with maybe 100 registered players each. ● The amount of space available will expand as the number of players increases, such as the Player Store street which must grow as the number of stores increases.