Problem
As technology continues to vitally impact our daily lives, more and more children become exposed to technology at a young age, and become vulnerable to cyberbullying through different forms of media. How might we raise awareness?
Research
Cyberbullying has unfortunately become a common form of harassment for young children. A 2016 report from Statistics Canada revealed that approximately 1.1 million young Canadians have experienced cyberbullying or cyberstalking.
Moreover, a recent survey indicated that cyberbullying is more prevalent among younger age groups, with 23% of Canadian students from grades 4-11 admitting to having said or done something mean or cruel to someone online.
Additionally, 37% of students reported that someone has said or done something online that made them feel bad.
Our goal
Our group want to raise awareness of cyberbullying through an interactive game application that exposes children to common cyberbullying scenarios and concepts.
Ideation
Together, our group brainstormed and developed a concept for our interactive game with the goal of providing an effective resource to raise awareness of cyberbullying.
Our ultimate goal was to prevent cyberbullying and its harmful consequences. Through numerous group meetings and coffee-fueled brainstorming sessions, we settled on a space-themed game that challenges children to combat cyberbullying and spread positive language throughout The Cyber Solar System.
We chose this theme because it would appeal to our target audience of young children, encouraging their imagination and providing a new and exciting world for them to explore.
How might we and Crazy 8's activates to help brainstorming different concepts
We decided to focus on the mini game
Our initial idea was to create a space-themed game in which the player is challenged to navigate to planets and complete missions related to cyberbullying. While completing each mission, the player would come across mini-games, tilt and touch games where the objective is to avoid asteroids with hurtful words. The game was meant to educate and raise awareness of cyber harassment.
However, we received feedback that the game's scope needed to be simplified. The feedback suggested making the mini-game into a full game, and our group decided to consider this feedback, given the limited time we had to create the game.
User Tesing
Our group conducted user testing with 12 participants to evaluate their interaction with the game's main menu design, the first level, their reactions to design flaws, and the game's ease of use and teachability. After completing the first user testing session, we received feedback that helped us recognize our strengths and areas for improvement.
Based on feedback from the participants, we made the following changes to the game:
• Increased the speed of the user-controlled spaceship and the booster
• Added multiple sets of colors as each level progresses to draw more attention to the words and sentences, and help players gain a better understanding of the meaning of the game.
• Added sound to the game to help to create an immersive and more enjoyable experience.
Our solution
Cybernauts is a tilt and touch game designed for mobile devices. The objective is to avoid asteroids with hurtful words and collect all the positive words to complete the sentence
The Cyber Solar System is a happy and safe place with many friendly planets. They all communicate kindly with each other. However, something has gone terribly wrong. An evil storm called Bully is now turning the planets and everyone mean. The once-friendly planets are now saying hurtful words to each other.
The only way to stop the Bully Storm is to send nice and helpful messages to it. This will destroy the Bully Storm and turn everyone back to being friendly again. Your mission is to save the Cyber Solar System before the Bully Storm turns all the planets mean forever!
Play the game
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