Critical evaluation
•  Brief synopsis
-Creating an educational multiplayer online game to improve education in secondary schools.
-The methods used in teaching students In schools in the UK have not adapted to the technologically minded youths of today.
-MMORPG games understand students better than teachers do. Education system can learn to adapt.
-Using games to implement concepts taught in class e.g. economics.
-Essentially ‘gamify’ learning process by adding in elements of competition, recognition and achievements.
•  Strengths of the work (results, techniques, recommendations ...)
Excellent ‘review of related works’ section. Illustrated relevant gaming apps that attract target audience, and evaluated accordingly. Great use of theory to back up your chosen problem.
•  Weaknesses of the work
-Images of review of related work.
-Second gen prototype: used paper, why? Evaluation. Surely you’d want to use a better tool to illustrate concept as a higher fidelity.
-In second gen, would be helpful to indicate how you’ve implemented first generation prototype features, and why you left out other features.
-Not many references to literature which is essential in justifying your project choice and concepts.
-No recommendations for their research i.e. what could be improved upon or taken from their project for people intending on solving the problem
-No reference to user requirements beyond that section.
-Evaluation in relation to user scenarios
•  Brief summary
o Including lessons that would have improved your own project



Group 44 sets out to solve the issue of there being a disconnect between the technologically savvy students and current ‘outdated’ teaching methods in the 21st century. As technology has advanced, teaching methods in schools are still archaic and haven’t developed accordingly, Group 44 intend to solve this by introducing a multiplayer online gaming platform for students to play to improve their education attainment in a more interactive manner. Gaming has revolutionised the young generation, and has the potential to be used in schools to improve education by implementing key features of gaming including competition, recognition and achievement. They aim their platform to secondary school students. They initially intend on creating an MMO based game, but as they continued their project, they ended up creating a more quiz-based like game whilst borrowing elements from popular MMO games such as a chatbox, ability to add friends, competitive rankings etc.

The strengths of this group’s report are: their report poses an interesting problem which is justified, and suggests an original solution. Their review of related works section shows that their concept works by analysing a large variance of applications and shows it can be adapted to be implemented in an educational scenario. In their prototypes, they borrow concepts from difference types of related works including MMORPGS, video games and  educational applications. Another key strength of their work is within their evaluation heuristic model, it is quite detailed and rather than using standard ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ for each standard, each aspect is rated quantitively out of 10, and then the mark is justified. A final key strength of their project is they back their intended problem up with a good number of literature, showing it’s a warranted problem which can be solved.

The weaknesses of their report were that the introduction reads more like an abstract or summary of the report rather than an introduction. The definition of the problem could be more precise, there wasn’t a single statement that describes the problem being solved as a whole. In their review of related works, they didn’t look at traditional education apps but rather focused more on gaming based apps. Further, there were no images to show their related works but rather just descriptions which made it a little difficult to conceptualise these applications. In their first generation prototypes section, there was little to no justification of the features and design of each prototype e.g. explaining why adding voice communication to the first gen is beneficial. Further, they say they used paper to design their first generation prototypes because it’s simple, yet in their third iteration they used balsamiq and then revert to paper for their second generation without any justification. There is no justification of their evaluation criteria for which they used Nielsen, nor did they once refer back or evaluate any prototype against the user requirements or scenarios which is essential for creating prototypes. In second gen, would be helpful to indicate how you’ve implemented first generation prototype features, and why you left out other features, also it has no evaluation, results or conclusion. Lastly, their summary and recommendations sections lacks any recommendations.

Overall, their report starts out well with a clearly defined issue and method to solve the issue and had a lot of good work put into their prototypes but lacks critical evaluation and justification of their work in relation to user scenarios which reduces the effectiveness of their solution.

Lessons to take for our project include remembering to justify all our features, layout, design for our prototypes in relation to our users.