I watched a student finish a level in Parallel, put down the controller, and immediately ask: "Was that good?" She had no idea. The game gave her a completion screen. It did not tell her she had taken 34 steps when the median was 18, or that she had revisited the same synchronization zone four times in a row.
That moment was not unusual. Over the course of this project I observed it again and again: students completing levels with genuine curiosity about whether their approach was efficient, then getting nothing back. The game had recorded everything. The data was there. It just never came back to the person who generated it.
This case study documents the development of OPM Viz, a visualization system for Parallel that transforms gameplay logs into reflection opportunities. Through a 21-month Design-Based Research project, I built something that lets students see where they lost time, compare their strategies to peers, and replay key moments with synchronized data. The goal was to make every completed level a starting point for learning, not an endpoint.
The Problem
Data Inaccessibility
Games like 'Parallel' record detailed information about student strategies and struggles—but this data lives in logs only researchers see. Students can't access their own performance data.
Missed Learning Opportunity
Research shows reflection and peer comparison enhance learning. Educational games generate the data needed, but don't provide tools to visualize it.
Surface-Level Dashboards
Existing dashboards show scores or completion rates, but don't reveal the "why." Students know they took 50 steps, but not which were inefficient.
Research Approach
As Lead UX Researcher and Designer, I conducted a 21-month Design-Based Research project to create and validate OPM Viz:
Instructor Focus Groups
Worked with 2 parallel programming instructors analyzing student gameplay to understand how experts identify learning moments.
Student Playtesting
Observed 10 students playing 'Parallel' and conducted semi-structured interviews to identify core needs.
Thematic Analysis
Coded qualitative data to understand patterns in student struggles and desires for improvement.
Design & Build
Built OPM Viz enabling peer comparison, metrics viewing, and synchronized replay.
Integration
Seamlessly connected the visualization with the 'Parallel' game's existing platform.
Evaluation
Conducted usability study with 8 students using think-aloud protocol and interviews.
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UXR pipeline adopted for this project: Understand → Design → Evaluate.
Understanding Users
Instructor Focus Groups
Before designing anything, I needed to understand how experts read gameplay data. I ran workshops with two experienced parallel programming instructors who had taught with Parallel across multiple semesters. These were not one-off consultations. Both instructors stayed as design partners for the full 21 months, reviewing prototypes, pushing back on design decisions, and telling me when something that looked clean on screen would not actually help a student learn.
What became clear early on was that the instructors and the students wanted fundamentally different things from the visualization. The instructors were thinking at the classroom level. They wanted to see which concepts tripped up most students this week, whether a cohort was clustering around the same inefficient strategy, and where in the game they should intervene before the next session. Students were not thinking about their cohort at all. They wanted to know whether their own approach was good, and if not, what specifically to do differently.
That tension shaped a lot of the design work. A visualization organized around class-level patterns would have been useful for instructors but alienating for students, who would see aggregate data without a foothold for personal meaning. A visualization built purely around individual improvement would have missed the comparison signal that instructors kept returning to as the most diagnostic information. The resolution I landed on was to make personal performance the entry point, with peer comparison as the mechanism for contextualizing it. Students start by seeing their own run, then pull in anonymized peers as reference points. Instructors can look at the same interface and read class-wide patterns from the comparison data that students are exploring for personal reasons.
Chunking Into Segments
Instructors broke gameplay into conceptual chunks, not continuous streams. "Steps 2 and 3, that's where the student is trying to figure out the Switch mechanism." Effective visualization needs to segment around learning concepts.
Spatial Context Matters
Instructors constantly connected gameplay actions to specific game areas. "This is happening in the synchronization zone"—linking spatial gameplay to abstract parallel programming concepts.
Comparative Analysis
Instructors rarely analyzed a single student in isolation. "This student used a mutex here, while this one avoided it entirely"—using comparison to highlight efficiency or alternatives.
Learning-Grounded Metrics
When ranking students, instructors evaluated based on core concepts: Did students identify critical sections? Did they minimize critical section size? Did they understand concurrency patterns?
Student Playtesting Insights
To understand what students need from a visualization system, we observed 10 students playing 'Parallel' and conducted semi-structured interviews. Through thematic analysis, three core needs emerged:
Efficiency Improvement
Players weren't satisfied with just completing levels—they wanted to know if solutions were efficient. Students craved ways to identify inefficiencies and learn from more optimal peer strategies.
Multi-Scale Comparison
Students wanted both high-level overview ("Did I take more steps overall?") and granular step-by-step comparison ("What did they do differently at step 15?").
Guided Discovery
When stuck, students wanted help without complete answers. They appreciated hints or alternative solution paths—nudges forward without defeating the challenge.
Key Outcomes
The evaluation confirmed OPM Viz successfully prompted the reflection we designed it for.
The Solution: OPM Viz
Guided by Shneiderman's Visual Information-Seeking Mantra ("Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand"), we designed OPM Viz—an interactive visualization system that integrates with 'Parallel' to empower student reflection.
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The OPM Viz Visualization System Interface showing peer comparison and metrics.
The system allows students to:
- View their own performance metrics against the community
- Compare solution paths against anonymized peers
- Filter peers based on performance or specific strategies
- Replay games side-by-side with synchronized playback
- Identify key differences and potential areas for improvement
Video Demonstrations
Explaining the features of the OPM Viz system.
Overview of the development process and algorithms.
Evaluation: Does it Foster Reflection?
We conducted an evaluative study with 8 students using think-aloud protocol and semi-structured interviews. Our analysis focused on whether students actually used comparison features, whether the system prompted reflection, and what specific insights emerged.
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Thematic map illustrating how students used OPM Viz for reflection and learning.
Facilitated Active Comparison
Participants consistently compared strategies with peers. "I thought my solution was good until I saw someone did it in half the steps. Now I'm curious how."
Identified Specific Inefficiencies
Students identified concrete areas of inefficiency: "I see—I backtracked here three times, but this student solved it without backtracking."
Sparked Conceptual Curiosity
"These two solutions both work, but they're using different synchronization patterns. I want to understand why."
Calibrated Self-Assessment
Students developed realistic views of where they stood relative to peers and where they needed to improve.
Impact & Contributions
Bridging OLMs and Games
Introduced an Open Player Model approach, adapting Open Learner Model principles for the dynamic context of serious games.
Learning-Focused Visualization
Designed and validated a player-facing visualization system prioritizing reflection and learning over purely aesthetic goals.
Enhancing 'Parallel'
Provided a novel tool for the established 'Parallel' research platform, enabling new avenues for studying game-based learning.
Published Research
The work was accepted at ACM CHI 2024 after peer review by independent domain experts. In this context, peer review means the methodology, findings, and design rationale were evaluated by researchers outside the project before the work was presented publicly. That process is a check on rigor, not just a credentialing step. It means the approach held up to scrutiny from people with no stake in the outcome.
Conclusion
OPM Viz successfully demonstrated how thoughtful visualization design can bridge the gap between gameplay data and meaningful learning reflection.
By centering the design process around both instructor expertise and student needs, we created a system that not only presents data but actively facilitates comparative analysis and reflection that leads to deeper understanding.
This work contributes to learning analytics and educational technology, showing how UX research methods can produce tools that genuinely support learning rather than simply display information. The evaluation results were positive, and the approach was validated through publication at ACM CHI 2024. Both things point in the same direction: grounding visualization design in real user behavior, with real design partners, over real time, is worth it.
Skills & Methods Demonstrated
Design-Based Research, Focus Groups, Usability Testing, Thematic Analysis, Think-Aloud Protocol
Visualization Design, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Educational Technology
Learning Analytics, Educational Games, Reflection Systems, Open Learner Models
Academic Publishing (CHI 2024), Iterative Development, Cross-Functional Collaboration