Student Portfolio
About Me
My name is Carlo and I am a second-year student currently studying Information Technology at Temasek Polytechnic. I am passionate when it comes to developing projects that will help other people. In my free time, I also enjoy learning about psychology. Thus, I have chosen to develop a game to help students deal with stress and anxiety for my Guided Learning project. The project is mostly self-directed, although I consult my Learning Facilitator to clarify doubts from time to time. This website will be showcasing my progress in developing my game. This e-portfolio is partial fulfillment of the subject Guided Learning.
Refined Learning Project Proposal and Learning Contract
Before I started to work on the project, I needed to refine my project proposal and come up with a learning contract.
These documents will help me keep track of my progress throughout the semester. I have listed specific deliverables that I plan to show in the portfolio as evidence of my learning.
Game Review
As I had planned to develop a game to reduce stress and anxiety, I looked for a game that focuses on this topic in order to have a better understanding of what I should look out for when developing my own.
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After some research, I found a game that piqued my interest. SuperBetter is a web-based app that aims to gamify the player's goals to make them more fun to work towards. It can also help players build resilience using methods backed by science.
I got to take on a superhero persona to create, customise, and complete small quests to work towards a bigger end goal. As I completed more quests, I gained more points in four different categories:
• physical resilience
• mental resilience
• emotional resilience
• social resilience
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Upon signing up, I was taught about these different types of resilience, how they can help and strengthen me. Being taught about the types of resilience and how to set small goals for them encouraged me to:
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• be more physically active throughout the day,
• challenge my willpower to mentally focus on a task,
• provoke positive emotions and
• reach out to people that I like.
I think SuperBetter is unique in that it does not only function as a tool to complete goals. It teaches the players like myself about what they could be struggling with and how it works. Once, I got a quest to read The Science of Anxiety, an article that talks about what causes anxiety, how it works and what it means for me. This helped me better understand why I feel anxious sometimes and what I can do to reduce the feeling. Other quests have also talked about common problems I have faced when stressed or anxious and simple ways to deal with them. For example, when I feel anxious, I can exercise my creativity and make art to feel better.
I believe using SuperBetter, in the long run, will significantly benefit players, especially students. It encourages players to set attainable short and long-term goals and stay consistent. It also makes the process more fun and can keep the player motivated to achieve their goals. Each part of the app has a meaningful purpose. For example, users can click an icon and find out how the quest list works and access links to learn how it helps them.
Even if the user only uses the app for a short period, the linked articles and quests can help them make sense of their feelings and provide healthy ways to deal with them.
Research Findings on Stress and Anxiety
After reviewing the game, I spent some time to research on how students are affected by stress and anxiety and methods to manage and reduce them.
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I found an extremely useful website that talks about this specific topic. They have listed out numerous causes, symptoms and signs of stress as well as ways to cope with it. Upon learning that sleep quality also plays a part in causing stress, I also found out good habits students can practice before going to bed.
Here is what I have learnt:
From my research, I have found that students have different causes for stress, such as academic demands and test anxiety, finances as well as post-graduate plans. For college students, academic demands and test anxiety is likely the most common long-term cause of stress. Students might feel pressured to achieve certain results and might not achieve them. Others may find themselves academically challenged for the first time in college, causing students a lot of stress. Moreover, students may have anxiety before or during tests and the symptoms can subsequently cause the student to perform poorly in the test.
To combat and manage stress and anxiety, students should get enough, good quality sleep, think positive, finding a hobby, engage in relaxation techniques or find someone to talk to. A study shows that students with poor sleep quality are 4.7 times more likely to be more stressed than those with good quality sleep. Moreover, not getting enough sleep is shown to impair memory and reasoning abilities. Students can improve their sleep quality by practicing good habits such as having a consistent sleep schedule and making their bedroom dark, quiet and cool. Students should also stop watching television and using their phone and computer at least 30 minutes before bedtime as they emit blue light which can delay their sleep and keep them awake for longer.
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References:
https://www.learnpsychology.org/student-stress-anxiety-guide/
Low-Fidelity Prototype
I began to brainstorm ideas and developed a low-fidelity prototype for a text-based adventure game using AdobeXD. If you would like to try the prototype, click here.
(Art by puppetbomb, icons from Icons8)
Writing the Story
As I am building a choose-your-own-adventure game, I drew an outline of how the story should flow depending on the choices the player makes. This outline will help ensure the choices link to the correct outcome when I start coding the game. I also wrote down the actual scenarios and choices that will be displayed in the game.
Final Prototype and Game Demo
With my story written down, I started to develop the game. I watched this tutorial to understand how text-based games work and implemented it in my game. I spent some time to code the logic and styled the game to make it look more appealing.
You can try out the game below or click here in case it does not work
