SKETCHVENTOR

In this paper, we detail the design evolution of Sketchventor, an original card game whose goal is to scaffold and promote players’ ideation and innovation skills. The card game is featured as part of The Tessera, an Alternate Reality Game funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF Awards 132378 & 1323306) that launched in January 2017. A gothic ghost story, The Tessera engages players with the history of computing by having them interact with famous persona–including Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage–who influenced the development of information technologies. As a transmedia experience, The Tessera has an online component at http://thetessera.org; a real world component at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; and an artifactual component in the form of The Tessera card deck (see Figure 1). In this paper, we focus on the analog version of Sketchventor, one of two games that can be played with the card deck (shown in Figure 1). Sketchventor’s print-and-play version can be found at https://goo.gl/riQjWJ, which contains instructions for the game, and a link to printable card files.