The working life of Museum of London

By Rosie Bullimore

I have recently been working with Rhiannon Looseley on the production of the Museum of London Docklands new online game called ‘Starting Out’. The purpose of the game is to encourage young people (aged 14 to 16) to start thinking about how they manage their money. The game is set on the eve of players leaving school and is a bit like the Game of Life, as the player makes decisions about what career path they will take, where they will live, what they will wear, what leisure activities they will do and how all of this will impact their pocket!

The game is part of a series of resources including a gallery interactive and schools session which have been developed with the support of Citi Foundation. It was quite a challenging game to create, as we had to make what could easily be seen as a rather boring and unpopular subject fun and interesting. The look of the game had a large part to play in this.

My role was to project manage the production of the game, by liaising with museum staff and the design company, and to ensure that the project was completed on time. I have never worked on an e-learning project before so it was really interesting to see the processes involved in making an online learning resource.

I joined the project at the initial meeting stage with the design company where the brief and ideas about how the game should be were put forward. After this Jenny Hastings, a museum freelancer who is familiar with the target audience, created the game content. This involved writing all the text that would appear in the game and also the basic game logic. Once this was done the game went through a series of testing, first in a paper version with some young volunteers (to check that we were generally on the right track), and then with a preliminary electronic ‘alpha’ version of the game which we tested in a school.

The alpha testing was really interesting because we were able to watch young people playing the game as well as get their valuable feedback. When the students first played the game they went really fast through the decisions without really reading things and were then a little dismayed when they found they were getting into lots of debt. The second time they played, students went much slower as they realized they needed to think about their choices more carefully. The evaluation was also really valuable for us to check we were getting the right tone and that students were able to relate to the game content. One thing we had forgotten was how much social life at school revolves around going to a friend’s house, so we made sure we added this into the leisure activity options.

The game took 3 months to complete which is generally quite a long time for this type of game. However as the Museum had specific learning aims and guidelines to follow, it ended up being quite a tight timeframe, as each stage of development had to be checked and signed off by at least 3 members of staff.

It was a really fun project to work on and will hopefully be a really useful resource for young people, especially now financial capability is part of the National Curriculum.

The game is now live on our website so do have a play! Re-live starting out and see if you can resist that lavish student lifestyle …