CENE

An Environmental Science ARG

Cene was an alternate reality game designed and developed by Fourcast Lab, a collective of scientists and game designers at the University of Chicago. Over the course of three weeks, middle schoolers from three different middle schools in Hyde Park learned about climate change through potential futures for the world. They collaboratively completed quests to advance their learning goals, and also participated in live interactive segments.

As a junior game designer, I was responsible for collecting and organizing over 2000 unique quest submissions from 300+ students in a way that made grading quests easier, which was quite the task!

The Problem

We initially received submissions in an excel sheet that had info from all the submissions in chronological order that listed which had submission contents, and we would manually update the scores for each team on a leaderboard that they could view on our website. However, we quickly ran into a variety of issues - teams would submit multiple submissions for the same quest, or they would submit something for the wrong quest, and we would have to check if they received points for it already (often leading to double counting points), or if they had not submitted something yet. As a small team juggling three leaderboards, trying to get through hundreds of quest submissions each day, this wasn't going to work.

The Process

I began work on a better version of our submission collection, but had several constraints - the submissions would still enter in that format, and I needed to output a point number for each team in a specific format on another spreadsheet. Additionally, I would have to design this while submissions were ongoing! I talked through the workflow with my other teammates to see what issues they had been experiencing and how I could alleviate them, and the two largest challenges were grading submissions for a quest that had already been completed, and finding new quests to grade. I began my work, and focused on these problems in my new system.

The Solution

In my updated sheet, submissions were organized primarily by team and quest number, instead of chronologically. Each box would update automatically with the newest submission for that team, and stop updating and turn green if they were given points. These were all linked to the submission as well, so that they could be looked at with a single click. I also added in functionality for quests that needed resubmission (yellow) and partial credit (blue). Each box's formula looked like this:

=IFS(NOT(ISNA(MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_10",Sheet1!$H:$H,0))),HYPERLINK(INDEX(Sheet1!$E:$E,MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_10",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)),MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_10",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)&"!"),NOT(ISNA(MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_NA",Sheet1!$H:$H,0))),HYPERLINK(INDEX(Sheet1!$E:$E,MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_NA",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)),MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_NA",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)&"?"),NOT(ISNA(MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_5",Sheet1!$H:$H,0))),HYPERLINK(INDEX(Sheet1!$E:$E,MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_5",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)),MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_5",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)&"*"),NOT(ISNA(MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_0",Sheet1!$H:$H,0))),HYPERLINK(INDEX(Sheet1!$E:$E,MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_0",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)),MATCH(K$1&$A39&"_0",Sheet1!$H:$H,0)&"~"),NOT(ISNA(MATCH(K$1&$A39,Sheet1!$H:$H,0))),HYPERLINK(INDEX(Sheet1!$E:$E,MATCH(K$1&$A39,Sheet1!$H:$H,0)),MATCH(K$1&$A39,Sheet1!$H:$H,0)&"E"),EQ(1,1),"NA") 

As a result, we only had to grade eighty quests per day maximum, instead of sifting through hundreds of duplicate submissions. This extremely cut down our workload and allowed us to actually catch up and stay ahead of those crafty middle schoolers!