Helping preserve traditional Northwest stories using modern educational games.
Winner of the 2017 Capstone Service Award.
The preservation of indigenous knowledge is a major information problem in linguistics, sociology, cultural heritage studies, & pedagogy.
The Wordplay team {Ian Durra, Elton Sequeira, Rajat Sethi, Akshay Singh, & Allen Snider} worked in close collaboration with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation to design & develop a proof of concept for a mobile game called Captíkwl (using the Colville term for “myths”, “legends”, or “Coyote stories”).
Our stakeholder-centered process sought to maximize the aesthetic fidelity & cultural sensitivity of our solution. Tribal representatives & speakers of Okanagan (or, Nselxcin) — an endangered, locally-indigenous language — were involved from the very beginning.
In Captíkwl, players will progress through an engaging narrative experience as they successfully complete a series of language-based puzzles. In this way, Captíkwl educates players about the indigenous culture & language of the Colville-Okanagan (Syilx) people.
In the future, Captíkwl’s innovative method of ‘knowledge preservation through game-based education’ will be expanded to also include ‘self-directed content creation’. Currently there are plans to scale the user-centered design methods & Unity-based development stack that our team refined, so that this process of cultural preservation gameplay will “actively interact with [its] community in need” all the more. Specifically, our stakeholders see great potential in the engaged & informed creation of new interactive stories by Captíkwl’s primary users: Colville youth themselves.
As the primary UX Designer, my particular role in implementing this award-winning capstone project & in laying the foundations for future engagement focused on the “fuzzy front end” of the process.
A rich body of background research framed the context for our project‘s methodologies, content, technologies, & goals. My own varied background bridging technology & the liberal arts allowed me to contribute domain knowledge that spans linguistic transcription, video game genres, computer supported collaborative learning, competitive review, discourse analysis, & the design process itself.
Following the insights provided by this multifaceted evidence gathering, ideation was the next key task. Through both texts & pictures, I generated divergent possibilities for gameplay mechanics, level design, educational puzzles, UI layout, & cultural questions.
This deep dive into Captíkwl‘s problem space produced process documents which naturally led me to more formalized stages of sketching, storyboarding, & prototyping.
At the close of the capstone experience, my design skills came back to the foreground through the construction of final deliverables. Along with polishing other documents, I designed our final presentation poster for the iSchool Capstone Showcase event, iterating through the phases of sketching, layout, revision, content creation, & refinement.
Back row: Dan Vogt, Ian Durra, Akshay Singh, Allen Snider, Elton Sequeira, Phil Fawcett;
Front row (L–R): Kristiina Vogt, Nancy Maryboy, Michele Seymour, Rodney Cawston.
Standing amongst my brilliant iSchool colleagues! :-)