Not everyone has the luxury of playing while adjacent to a friend, however. Making Contraption Maker into a Social Game Though it might seem like a single-player game, the developers at Spotkin are trying to make Contraption Maker a social experience. “And from a kid’s perspective, it’s also fun to show off to a teacher or adult how you figured something out.”įike says learning through cooperative play makes educational concepts much more “sticky.” This means they endure longer and help players form deeper connections with the information than they might have on their own. “Your crazy ideas build off their crazy ideas until you’ve made something great,” she says. Interaction and problem solving encourage people to expand their minds and take pride in their creations. Then you can show off when you find something cool, ‘Did you know the cat bounces off the trampoline?’ Or, you can learn from your buddy ‘How do you light the paper lantern?'”įike uses LEGO blocks as an analogy of how this sort of person-to-person play works. “While you can have a blast figuring this out on your own, we’ve found it’s much more fun to be sitting next to someone while you go through this discovery process. This, says Fike, teaches players to work as a team. Playing with another person encourages one to work with others and learn from them and their experiences. This means playing cooperatively with others while seated near each other. “In making the failure enjoyable, we encourage kids to keep trying to get to that ‘A-Ha!’ moment,” she says. Failure is certainly a core part of the Contraption Maker experience, but over time the developers at Spotkin have also discovered the game is best when shared with friends. It’s an important skill to learn, but it’s also hard because no one likes failure.”īut it’s in those breakthrough moments, Fike claims, that Contraption Maker truly shines. This method of ‘try something, fail, and try again’ is 99 percent of how scientists test theories. “Instead, you’re learning what doesn’t work, so you try with something else. And it doesn’t feel like ‘failure,’ because it’s goofy and fun to watch even when things don’t turn out like you expect,” says Fike.
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“Contraption Maker is a stealthy way of teaching the foundations of the scientific method,” Fike says, pointing to the fact that continued failure and persistence are the only ways the game can be mastered.Ĭontraption Maker is inspired by the classic PC game The Incredible Machine.
Because of this, the developers are able to create an experience that is educational without being overbearing or obvious. This makes it a great way for kids (and adults) to hone their problem-solving and critical thinking skills under the guise of entertainment. “The core gameplay idea is quite simple and endures as a very powerful way to promote the sciences.”Ĭontraption Maker mirrors The Incredible Machine’s use of logic and reasoning. “We have constantly received feedback from players about how encouraged them to be in a field,” says Deborah Fike, Director of Educational Outreach at Spotkin. They felt they could use modern technology to encourage a new generation of students to take interest in science and other STEM-related fields. The developers at Spotkin decided to revive and re-imagine the original concepts of The Incredible Machine. The game now sits with a highly positive user rating on the PC gaming client Steam. Contraption Maker was released in July of 2014. Contraption Maker is both a successor and evolution of The Incredible Machine’s core concept. And the company includes the same people behind The Incredible Machine. Contraption Maker was created by Spotkin. The latest of these is Contraption Maker. The game had several iterations in the ’90s and ’00s that were used recreationally and in various academic settings. Players of The Incredible Machine were tasked with fulfilling objectives by setting off chain reactions. One of these is The Incredible Machine, a game first developed in the mid-’80s for the PC. Since then, multiple adaptations of Goldberg’s work have appeared in various forms of pop culture. Goldberg was a cartoonist and inventor who made diagrams of these intricate, elaborate systems for his artwork. This style of machine was first popularized by Rube Goldberg.
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