Edita Satiene
SIC, together with the associated partner Kaunas University of Third Age, held the SAA game testing workshop in Kaunas on March the 4th. The workshop was attended by 35 participants of the U3A Faculty of Technologies. All participants were retired people with different backgrounds. The aim of the workshop was to introduce the project, the concepts of ageism, gamification, and the beta version of the SAA game. The game was presented and the rules were explained on a big screen and on March 15th the U3A students will come to a computer lab to play the game individually with the assistance from SIC.
The workshop started with the presentation of the SAA project goals and the results delivered so far, followed by the examples of ageism in different areas, then a short explanation of gamification in education, and finally the explanation of the game concept and rules. Between the parts of the presentation, the Q&A and polling tool Slido was used to get instant feedback. The traffic light activity from the Toolkit was used to liven up the workshop. Two cases from health sector were tested in Kaunas.
The participants found the cases comprehensible and realistic, but the characters seemed too young for them. The text of the dialogues seemed a bit too long as it takes time to wait until the end of the sentence. There was also a remark about the balance between the size of the character and the speech balloon. The participants preferred to have larger speech balloons. The participants also commented that the text of the Code of Conduct has to be reviewed and made simpler. The participants found the first minigame slightly difficult to understand while the second minigame was engaging.
The workshop was evaluated very positively and the participants eagerly registered for the next session in computer lab.