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Instructional Objective | Learners
& Context | Object of Game | Game
Materials |
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Time Required | Rules | Design
Process | References |
The
learners will become familiar with the content and types of questions
they will encounter on the Examination for Professional Practice in
Psychology (EPPP).
Learners
& Context of Use
The game
is designed for pre-licensure therapists who need to pass the licensing
exam in order to work with clients.
The
object of the game is to be the first person to help your client move
from a state of distress to well-adjustment by winning 4 mental health
tokens.
*
Game board
* 6 game pieces for players
* A six-sided die
* 1 stack of cards for each of the 8 categories
* 1 stack of Fortune(?)
cards
* 1 stack of Mental Health(M) cards
* 1 bag of Mental Health tokens (pennies)
The
game is for 2 to 6 players and will play for approximately thirty minutes
to an hour.
The
Rules
Setup
1. Open
the board and place the card stacks on their corresponding spaces.
2. Put
the game pieces on the couch.
3. Give
each player one Mental Health token.
4. Each
player picks one category from the eight to work with for this session.
5. Roll
to see who goes first. The player with the highest number goes first.
Play follows to the next player clockwise.
Game
Play
Players
move around the board in either a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction
- whichever they choose, but they must always follow this direction.
1. At
the beginning of their turn, a player answers a question from his
or her category asked by the player on their left.
-
If
they answer incorrectly, they do not get to roll the die
and advance.
-
If
they answer correctly, they may roll the die and move the
number of squares they rolled.
Blank
space - The player waits there for their next turn.
Fortune(?)
space - The player takes a card from the Fortune pile.
The player does whatever the card commands.
Challenge space - If the player
wants a Mental Health token from the player on their right, they
can now challenge them if they so choose. If this is the case:
-
The
challenger takes a card from his or her category's stack of
cards and reads the question to the player being challenged.
-
If
the player being challenged is incorrect, they lose a Mental
Health token.
-
If
the player is correct, the challenger loses a Mental Health
token.
- If
a Challenge is not made, play continues to the next player.
Mental
Health(M) space
- The person to the player's left will take a Mental Health card
and read it to the player.
-
If
the player answers incorrectly, the don't receive a Mental
Health token.
-
If
the player answers correctly, they get a Mental Health
token.
5.
To win:
A player must collect 4 Mental Health tokens, reach the couch space
and answer one last question.
-
If
a player reaches the couch space with 4 tokens and answers the
question incorrectly, then they must pick up a chance card
and do what it says.
- If
a player reaches the couch space with 4 tokens and answers the question
correctly, they win.
Design
Process
The Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) consists
of 200 multiple choice questions within 8 areas, with each item having
4 possible responses. Our first thoughts about how the game would
be designed revolved around a game board which would represent the
brain. Players would start at the brain stem and progress through
the lobes – from basic to highest intelligence. This would be
reflected in easy questions at the beginning to the most advanced
at the end. We ended up going through another board idea before we
came to the final version that would be based on the Monopoly layout.
We
searched the web for information regarding the EPPP and accumulated
a lot of information regarding the test including sample test questions.
We interviewed a psychology student who is going to take the EPPP
in the near future and talked to a few other psychology students and
they all said that a game to help them prepare for the EPPP would
be awesome. There aren’t any games out there, yet, to help students
study for the EPPP. There are practice tests that students can buy,
though.
Once
a psychologist is licensed, they will be able to work with clients,
independently of a supervisor. We used this idea – to take a
client through from distress to mental health – as a device that
would drive the players to move through the board. As the player collects
Mental Health tokens, the client gets better.
To
make it more fun and interactive between the players, we came up with
Challenge squares. This also represents the competition that the students
feel when taking the test. Not all people pass, even with high scores.
The challenge areas of the game follow the reality of the test. The
worse your competition does, the more likely you will pass the test.
The Challenge squares allow players to challenge others for their
Mental Health tokens. If they don’t pass the Challenge, you can
take one of their tokens.We had tried to come up with a different
board setup and thought of using a labyrinth as a model. We thought
we would then incorporate mini-boards that would attach to the main
board. These mini-boards would represent different places, such as
a mental health ward. The players would start out with a scenario
with a client, like they would have in real life, and have to travel
the board in search of items to collect in order to help the client.
We ended up not going with the labyrinth idea because it could get
too complicated. The goal of the game is to help the students learn
the content of the eight categories on the test and we decided that
a monopoly type board would better enable this to happen. We rejected
the brain board idea as well. The Monopoly board would allow us to
have more spaces for interactivity and people would be familiar with
that type of board so there were be less time trying to figure out
how to get around the board.
During usability testing we found a number of small discrepencies
that interfered with understanding the game. Due to this feedback
we made the following changes:
What we
would do differently:
- Make
it more obvious which answer on the cards is the correct one
- Including
putting the answers either in their own booklet or putting it
smaller upsidedown in a corner
- Make
it abundantly more clear to players what the different variations
of the game are
- For
instance, one person can just use the cards as flash cards and
two or more players could use them without the board, testing
each other turning it into a type of game show like Jeopardy
- Make
the tokens something other than pennies
Books
& Journals
Electronic
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