BeadLoom Game: adding competitive, user generated, and social features to increase motivation

BeadLoom Game (BLG) is an educational puzzle game designed to teach students basic Cartesian coordinates, iteration, and layering. Although this game has been proven to be successful at teaching students these concepts, many participants reported wanting more competitive and free-play creative elements in the game. In response, we augmented the BeadLoom Game with a competitive high score table, a creative custom puzzle mode, and a social network framework. Here we report results of an experiment where middle school students are given versions of the BLG with different combinations of these new features. Based on the in-game metrics and player surveys we show that while both the competitive and the creative game modes increase a majority of the player's motivation it is not until we add both features that we maximize this effect. Through a combination of creative and competitive game modes we are able to have the highest motivation for the largest number of different players.