Dr. William Hawkins III (hawkinwh@ucmail.uc.edu)
Educational video game for genetics.
This project is an educational video game about genetics. Genetics is a broad topic, so it had to be constrained to fit a smaller set of concepts. To that end, this project is aimed at high school aged children that are taking a biology class.
A high school biology class covers genetics concepts that include traits, alleles, genes, inheritance, and evolution. To ensure that this project can be used by the vast majority of its target audience, accessibility is a major constraint.
To that end, this project will include international language features, a mouse-focused user interface, and will take into account color-blind users.
Accessibility was a main focus for the UI, we wanted non-gamers to be able to quickly understand how to play the game. To that end, most of our games are drag and drop, or relate to the mouse in some way. There is no keyboard movment to avoid confusion. You can read more about our design decisions in the Project Constraints. Also, feel free to read the high level summary for more details about the visual style.
It should be noted that we also have an automatic build system that checks status of pull requests, see here
As this is a video game, much of the "user guide" is self contained within the videogame itself, though we also wrote this wiki page.
Answers to common questions can be found in the FAQ section of the User Guide.
We did not change the presentation much, as we built in an interactive tutorial system into our game as well as utilized our poster for the expo presentation. Project Slideshow
Also see appendix links.
There have not been any expenses for this project, and we do not plan to have any in the future. All the software that we are utilizing is free to use. The only potential expenses for this project are related to distribution.