Looking to engage learners with wordplay? The Wheel of Fortune® game in The Training Arcade® does exactly that! It’s a great way to pre-test, pre-teach, present, or practice key terms and concepts. Just like the game show, there are three types of rounds—Spin, Toss Up, and Bonus. You can arrange them in whatever order best supports your learning objectives.
Building a Wheel of Fortune game is quick and easy. Choose a round type, type your puzzle, and adjust settings as needed. You can even insert other learning material (text, images, or videos) before or after each puzzle to provide context, support, and reinforce the experience. Play the demo here to know more.
Let’s start by drawing some inspiration from video game design. Because it is puzzle-based, building a Wheel of Fortune game is a little different than building a Trivia game or a series of knowledge checks. Game design is all about building fun and engaging experiences, but it’s also about teaching. Whether players are battling a boss in Zelda Breath of the Wild or learning pattern groupings in Candy Crush, they need to learn and improve strategies to get better at the game. And game designers need to teach those techniques slowly throughout the gameplay. Here are three key game design techniques that we used when creating the Wheel of Fortune game to ensure the result is both fun and engaging.
Wheel of Fortune has three different rounds that allow you to easily provide variety and fine-tune the difficulty level so you can keep your learners motivated and engaged. But before you can do that you need to know a little bit more about each round, what makes them different, and how to arrange them around a player’s “flow state.” The three rounds are:
This is what people think about when they think about Wheel of Fortune: the big wheel that contestants spin. Three human conditions make this round so much fun to play.
These 3 things make the Spin round engaging and fun, but they also increase randomness. Players do not have control over the wheel, so their scores are more likely to reflect luck rather than knowledge. As a result, it doesn’t provide clean assessment data. Wheel of Fortune, as a training game, is highly effective and fun for knowledge checks, but not necessarily in the Spin Mode. So it is best to use Spin round to introduce concepts, drive engagement or buy-in, and to provide breaks in between or on the way up to more challenging content—not for assessment.
There is a lot of energy and excitement during this part of the game, but it is also the most challenging round to design and play! Players are very focused (consciously or subconsciously) on gameplay strategies such as letter and wheel probabilities. Our human tendency towards selective attention makes it hard for them to switch between these strategies and the content, too. To test this out yourself, watch this video by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.
Because learners have so much on their minds during this round, learning content may appear much harder than it actually is. Players are also primed to focus on letter probability, so words with a lot of uncommon letters will seem harder. Instead of using this for your most challenging puzzles, think of it as a fun and safe space for players to get familiar with and practice content. Here are some quick tips for designing a more fun, engaging, and effective Spin round.
During the Toss Up round, letters are revealed one by one. Players guess the puzzle as soon as they can before all of the letters are revealed.
Players don’t spin the wheel, so the category and the puzzle have their full attention. Because letters are revealed over time, a clue system is built in. As a result, Toss Up is the perfect place for very challenging learning content or words or phrases with uncommon lettering. You can also use it to test people’s knowledge because scores are based on how quickly a person solves; not by random wheel spins. We recommend that you use Toss Up to provide peak challenges and to use it as a knowledge check for learners.
The Toss Up round starts off challenging (no letters are shown), but it gets easier until players can be sure they know the answer. Unlike the Spin round, players only have to focus on solving the puzzle. So they are more likely to read and retain the category name and they will have more mental space to focus on the content.
The Bonus Round starts with a few letters revealed (usually RSTLNE, but you can customize to meet your needs). You may allow players to select a few additional letters as clues. Players must solve the puzzle before the time is up. In the game show, the Bonus round is always the very last puzzle. It is usually quite challenging and intended to “stump” people. But in your learning game, you do not have to make it that difficult and you can insert it any place you’d like.
The difficulty of the Bonus round has a lot to do with the letters you provide players upfront and how many letters you let them guess. When you build the game, you can customize this to fit your needs—provide no letters, or up to any 6 letters; and how many additional letters (up to 3 consonants and 2 vowels) players can choose. Keep in mind that after all of these letters are revealed, there are no more clues so your players might get stuck. As a result, the category plays a key role in how difficult the puzzle will be. All told, as a result of their structure, Bonus Rounds tend to be more difficult for learners to solve than the Spin Round but easier than the Toss Up. Use Bonus Round for practice or assessment, to build up to a challenge, and to insert more variety and novelty into the user experience.
Use the Bonus Round as another fun way for players to practice content and be assessed on what they’ve learned.
Earlier, we talked about how game design is focused on the user experience. That perspective is key to crafting good puzzles for Wheel of Fortune. When you first get started, you won’t really get a good sense of how difficult the puzzle will be until you see it and play it yourself. So it’s important to spend time playing the rounds to see what the puzzles are like and how your content feels. Ask other people to play them too! You can easily back and tweak the difficulty or change the puzzle types, clues, or categories. You’ll soon be able to create a great flow state that will keep your users engaged and having fun with your learning content.
More games on your mind? Sign up for a free trial of The Training Arcade and explore more game templates to engage and motivate your learners.