Gram's House is a game designed to encourage middle school girls to see computer science in a new, positive light as well as learn real computer science skills through puzzle-based gameplay.
Game Concept
Computer science is still a gender-imbalanced field. Outreach efforts in the form of classroom visits, summer camps, and more appear to be helping. Inspired by this, we designed Gram’s House to reach an even larger audience of middle school girls than is possible in person.
In Gram’s House, the player takes on the role of a computer scientist. Her grandmother very much wants stay in the house she and her late husband built from the ground up, but her ability to live safely on her own diminishes as she ages. Gram’s social workers believe it would be better for Gram if she moved to a retirement home. Thus the player decides to use her skills to outfit the place with technology Gram can use to remain independent, and strikes a deal with the social workers: if Gram’s house is sufficiently equipped within one month, she can continue to live there.
The player collects technology by visiting various locations in the game’s world. Each piece of technology must be activated by solving a computer science related puzzle with topics ranging from binary numbers to theorems to algorithm design.
Research has shown that middle school-aged girls have a preference for puzzle games and that they do indeed care about making a social difference. These two factors are addressed in the game without excluding other audiences (particularly male students).
Preliminary Research Questions
- Will playing a fully featured video game positively change the perception that middle school girls have of the field of computer science?
- Will the players see the opportunity for making real social impact with computer science after playing the game?
- Will the players learn real computer science concepts through the puzzle mini-games?
- Will the interactive nature of the game be more effective than Dot Diva’s approach of creating a widely available webisode (online television series about two female game programmers)?
Current State of the Project
A pilot project lead by Carolee Stewart at Kean University was recently funded for Summer - Fall 2012. The research team will develop a new set of mini-games in a 3D environment, extending the game demo described below. Both versions will be tested with middle school students to see how effective the game concept is at putting CS in a positive light and teaching CS skills.
Future plans include obtaining a grant through the National Science Foundation or similar programs so the game can be professionally developed and evaluated.
I and three other team members (Jacob Agar, Jamie Madill, and Matthew Shelley) originally designed Gram's House for Microsoft's Imagine Cup game design competition.
Original Game Demo Installer
Download this installer (zipped) and play the demo version of the game for yourself. It was built in XNA and thus will only work on Windows. Please let me know if you have problems running it and I will try to help.
Demo Resources
Original artwork by Jonathan Demers and Nicole Will, used with permission.
Original background music by Shannon Cressman, used with permission.
Royalty-free sound effects from Flash Kit, and Hollywood Sound Effect.
http://www.flashkit.com/
http://www.dewa.com/sound/
Personal (non-commercial) sound effects from The Recordist.
http://www.therecordist.com/free-sfx/
Original Demo Game Play Video