Amy Smith Muise participated in a session about user testing during Casual Connect USA 2014. “Testing is not something we do at the end of the day after everything has been completed,” she said. “Testing is part of our design process.”
Amy Smith Muise manages partnerships for education, distribution, and educational use of the products of the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University. The Learning Games Lab, part of Media Productions, specializes in designing and testing educational tools. Their products are research-based and developed for a variety of audiences, including youth, college students, the research community, policy makers, and workers in particular industries.
Appreciating User Needs
Muise has worked in college level teaching and curriculum development in a number of fields. As a result, she appreciates the needs of educational users. She also loves the opportunities her job gives her to learn about various subjects. Past topics include astronomy, animal science, biology, English, food science, and mathematics.
At the Learning Games Lab, they believe parents and schools are becoming increasingly savvy consumers of educational games. Muise maintains, “Demand will soar for games that support conceptual learning and engage users in exploration, not just drill and practice, and not just surrounding traditional ways of presenting information with nice graphics and animation.”
Muise began her career creating more traditional educational media and online learning modules. But she feels these materials cannot compare to game-based learning, and insists, “It’s incredible how games can support leaps in conceptual understanding.”
The most interesting place Muise has played a game herself is probably out in the middle of rugged country, since she lives on a working ranch in New Mexico. She gives her children mobile devices with strategically loaded games to keep them safely occupied while she and her husband are working to accomplish something tricky like roping and branding a calf or scrambling up a cliff to mend a broken fence. But she does point out that she has to be careful what games she gives them, or they will come wandering over asking for help solving a puzzle just as she is tied up with something.
These days, Muise and her children are playing Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery on iPad and the educational history game, Time Tribe, in browser. They are eagerly waiting for its release to iPad. For herself, she is playing the narrative game The ORPHEUS Ruse from Choice of Games, on iPad.
Other than gaming, her hobbies include playing old-time fiddle and cello in a string band.
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