Map-based educational quiz game

Software	OO language, (optionally) SQL
Covers	Design and development of a game, database design
Skills Required	Programming, game design, databases
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

The object of the project is to develop an educational quiz game in which the player answers questions to overcome obstacles or move around a board, with or without a random element in how far the player moves at each step. The idea is to motivate the player to learn the answers to the questions or feel rewarded for having put in some learning previously, as well as get hints about what they need to revise.

This will require a mechanism for asking questions, just like a non-spatial quiz system. It would gain from a mechanism for defining questions without editing code, and ideally a way to swap in and out sets of quiz questions. Where the quiz structure itself might go beyond the needs of a non-spatial quiz system is that the questions should be associated in some way with particular locations on a map or board, so that reaching a particular point causes a particular question to be asked, or a question to be selected from a particular question set.

The educational quiz game will also need a mechanism for showing a game board, and the player's position on it, which will change when the player makes a move or answers a question correctly. Depending on the nature of the quiz game, the player might also need to make a free choice of where to go, and this would need to be implemented and shown.

The system would gain from the ability to include more than one map / game board, and more than one set of questions. It might be good to have a number of images with parts of the route or space sequence on them, as part of one more complex game. A possibility is having extra loops that you can go round for bonus points or get kicked into if you fail basic questions.

Variants

The nature of the quiz game will depend both on the topics of the knowledge the quiz demands, and on the nature of the space the player travels around.

Game Board: One approach would be to have a game board with a sequence (maybe a branching sequence) of spaces that a player can go to, so that a player moves one or a small integer number of spaces on each turn or with each correct answer. The spatial arrangement of the spaces is whatever looks graphically attractive. Complex organic molecules might lend themselves to gamification for a chemistry-based game.
Map Journey: Another approach would be to have a seqence of logical spaces shown (or just be implicitly there) on a map of a real two dimensional space, or diagram of a physical object such as the human body, or map of a region such as Europe. Moves are to particular locations on the map which are associated in the internal representation of the game with particular logical spaces. The questions might include asking people to find particular locations: (Where is Stonehenge?)
Map Reading Game: The game could be about the map itself, asking the user to interpret features of the image they see in order to get questions right. A possibility would be a picture of the human digestive system where people are asked what things are called that are near the place where the player is, and other questions about the human digestive system. With easy questions you need to get them right to avoid being vomited out or lost in severe diarrhoea. You score points as you make it to the small intestine and your nutrients are absorbed.If the spaces are shown on the image, they need to be displayed so they are clear enough without swamping the information shown on the diagram, though maybe the user could toggle between a clean image and the image with game information.

Cross-Reference

A project developing a quiz-setting system for entertainment or testing would look a bit different. See the Internet Quiz System project proposal.

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