Team: Nancy Birkholzer, Emily Bolon, Matt Howard, Guy Papstein, Ruiyan Xu

School: Mt. Pleasant High School
Teacher: Diane Cresto
Audience: 10th Grade ESL and Special Education Students

Project: Ms. Cresto works with both students in special education classes as well as students for whom English is a second language. The reading levels in English of the two groups she works with is between a 2nd and 5th grade level. She would like a program that helps reinforce the 2nd-5th grade level grammar skills she teaches. Specifically, she wants the program to teach capitalization, punctuation, and tenses. Together with Ms. Cresto, we have decided to make this program a video game where the students have to practice grammar skills to advance a story narrative. The game will use a web like multi-linear structure to to accommodate different abilities. In other words, at each point in the game, if a student does well they will get harder questions, if they do poorly they will get easier questions. Hopefully, the different paths through the game's branching structure will lead to different but equally rewarding game endings. The game will generally reward students only for correct choices and not for correcting mistakes. We're committed to simultaneously rewarding the students for their efforts and engaging them through the narrative in order for them to be motivated about mastering these skills.

There are many parts of the program we are still deciding on. For one, we haven't figured out how to make this program provide a repeated challenge so it has long and effective lifespan of use. Furthermore, we need to meet with the students and engage them in the project to help decide on what kind of story we want to surround the game.

Potential challenges of the project include:
Adjusting to different student abilities
Making the project consistently rewarding and long lived enough to actually reinforced skills
Making the narrative compelling to 10th grade ESL and Special Ed students at Mt. Pleasant
Making all the art necessary for an animation intensive project
Handling the differences in learning styles between ESL and Special Ed students

Tools:
We are likely to use at least one or both of Authorware and Director. We're not sure to what extent we will incorporate a pure programming component.