Platforms: iOS, Android Requires: Camera Access, GPS
Tamuyal is a location-based, mobile, educational game for increasing K-12 students' interest in STEM fields.
Tamuyal, presents a new approach to increase K-12 students' awareness of higher education in STEM by showcasing some of the majors, including non-STEM majors to cater to more students, while touring our campus. The game, in its current form, covers fun STEM facts, facts specific to our campus, and facts about jobs related to some STEM careers. Our product is meant to be fun, inspiring, motivating, and educational. We hope to accomplish this by combining information about majors on campus, physical exploration, local animal and plant species, and a Mayan theme for cultural relevance to minority students. In the future, we hope to add specifics about the college application process, college life, more related STEM careers, and what a day in a related job may be like.
Gameplay The game's location recommendations are tailored to each student's personal academic interests which are obtained through a survey. Students play as a field biologist and are encouraged to explore campus to discover and nurse local species back to health. Banners mark places of interest where a local animal species can be found. As students discover more animals they learn more about campus, majors, and the animals. Students can track their full progress through the game in the profile screen that shows them the animals they have caught. The venues button shows them the summaries for all the locations they have visited, which includes information about majors, and the journal shows them their last 5 activities.
The classifier parses survey responses from current college students or alumni about interests and majors. These responses are used to train a classifier and the resulting matrix is used in MSProject with the young player's interest responses for major recommendations.
Unity Assets Used Go-Map (requires Map-Zen API Key)