Month: December 2015

Hi there! This is the last week before the final presentation. Flint worked with the client to guarantee a stable final delivery.

On Monday / Tuesday the team continued to commit to every piece of improvement on the experience.

On Wednesday the team went to EFSD and tested the whole experience with the installtion – which is the final setup – with over 40 students. We discussed with students and teachers to ensure we deliver the right thing that fits their need.

On Thursday the team tried their best to react to the feedback teachers are talking about. The major points are regarding to 1) networking was not working on Wednesday 2) How to convey the required information for the teacher in the result screen.

On Friday the team went to EFSD again and did another test with 20 students. This time we had the features function, and kids really love our experience!

The challenge now is to commit to as much polish as the team could, and be ready for the Final Presentation… !

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Hi there! On the first day of Week 14 we had the Soft Opening to all the faculties. Faculties came and played our experience, mentioned a lot of feedback, which means a lot of work to do, and we need to commit to it.

On Tuesday the team continued to work on the experience while talked to several faculties about how to improve the experience according to the feedback.

On Wednesday the team talked with the advisor about the plan towards final. We analyzed the feedback from the faculties and decided to work on 3 major improvements: better UX flow, better UI and completed installation experience.

On Thursday the team invited faculties to talk about Physics, playtest and user interface. For the final improvement, the team tried to get detailed information about how to polish every piece of the experience. The team quickly react to that and a new version of UI was implemented immediately.

Previous design – chalk board style

Current design – architectural style, more track of information

The team commit to every piece of the UI improvement on Friday and talked with the client about a final playtest. We planned to test every pieces of the experience and see how kids feel about it. We also need to check the installation and kiosk to guarantee they work as expected.

The team is always aiming at provide the best possible experience, while at this stage, a big challenge will be how to finish as much important improvement as possible within the scope. The team tried to best prioritize all tasks and commit to it.

See you next week!

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Hi there! We are in the Thanksgiving week, but our team members are still working on some final polishing before the Soft Opening.

On Monday the team meet and decided what should be done before the Soft. We quickly listed out the tasks that are still outstanding and prioritized them. We would finish all that is in High priority before the soft.

On Tuesday we luckily have Dr. Deborah Stine from the main campus, who is a content expert in energy topics, to look at our project and give us feedback. Dr. Stine kindly provided a lot of resources online for us to dig in.

Have a nice Thanksgiving! We see you on Soft Opening…

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Testing, debugging and implementing. Flint was preparing the best experience possible for both the coming playtest and the soft opening.

On Tuesday we have all the detailed dimensions of the installation decided and sent out. The builder, Mr Bruce agreed to work on that since 18 Dec, and we tried to prepare as much we could before he began.

On Wednesday we invited Mike Christel again to plan for the coming playtest in Friday. We very much appreciated his comments, because he not only gave us suggestions on how to improve the playtest, but also several nuances that could easily overlook on the experience design: timing! Knowing this, we plan to time different part of experience on Friday.

On Thursday we were informed that a community tour would be in ETC on the morning of Friday. Considering we went to the school between 11 AM ~ 3 PM, we decided to also have these students playtest our experience.

On Friday, when the community tour students came to the room, we noticed that by streaming what was there on the touch screen to the big TV, the observers felt much more involved in the experience; they even talked to the players about how to design a better blade. We love this atmosphere and we decided to test the same thing with the kids. It worked like a charm! We decided to put this in our final TV UI design.

The soft opening is approaching. The team was trying to do the best to deliver a complete experience!

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This week, starting from Monday, Flint started to connect each piece of the experience together and tried to make it a complete experience.

On Tuesday, the team finalized the two candidate designs of the installation. The next day, two of our members went to the school and had a meeting with the teachers as well as the builder at EFSD.

We together with the client made the decision on which design we would go. Thanks Mr Bruce from EFSD who would build the whole thing, you rock!

As the design of the installation was decided, on Thursday the team continued to decide all the components we would need to buy for the installation and planned the budget. The Entertainment Technology Center decided to donate 2 towers for this project, which eased our pressure of running out of budget. We really appreciate it!

On Friday the team had a visitor again – this time, it was Respawn! Following that was the regular client meeting. We were glad to hear that every component on the list was ordered. We decided a new playtest the next week (on Nov 20) to see how that feels on the touch screen we ordered. (And of course, test the new experience with the students!)

The team need to finish the experience as soon as possible for the playtest. This will be an important playtest before the soft opening. See you next week!

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Here comes November. The next half of the semester began, and Flint kept making progress!

On Monday the team got detailed feedback from the advisors on Halves. The team discussed on some feedback, and tried to make appointment for several faculties for details regarding some of them. Also on Monday, we bought the MegaFlow plugin to better visualize the wind pattern in the experience. We believed this could improve the experience a lot.

On Tuesday the team invited Jessica Hammer to talk about how should we improve the experience, especially the “competition” in it. To have a common ground about the competition, and to balance the two major topics (i.e. aerodynamics in blade design, and wind pattern correlated to landscape), Jessica brought several ideas for the team to discuss. It was very helpful!

On Wednesday, our installation designer talked with the client on some of the dimensions regarding the installation, and further improved the design documents.

On Thursday we had Dr. Scott Stevens come in our room and shared several papers and open source software on blade design related calculations and/or simulations. The team would look into how these may be applied into the experience.

On Friday’s regular meeting, the client passed by a content expert in wind energy area. We immediately made contact with this expert – Dr. Deborah Stine from the Scott Institute of Energy – and invited her to come and talk with us. Dr. Stine replied gladly that she would love to come at the end of November. We would prepare a bunch of questions to ask which would definitely help!

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Welcome to the week of the Halves Presentation!

On Monday one of our advisors, Heather and the producer, Chris drove to EFSD to attend their event on interactive educational experience. Many teachers and lecturers came to the event to see how EFSD applies interactive technologies to teach science subjects. Flint successfully presented our new project as the third project in the series, and promoted the Entertainment Technology Center as the professional developer of educational games.

On Tuesday, the team well rehearsed the presentation which would be on air on Wednesday, and finalized the slides and demos.

On Wednesday Flint presented the progresses. We stated every piece we had tried: the ideas on installations, the playtest, the experience flow, and clearly stated our plan and risk assessment. Several questions from the faculties mentioned some nuances that we overlooked and were very helpful.

On Thursday EA representatives came and visited the project team. After that, the team discussed some feedback from the Halves, and started to concern about changes we should made according to it.

To solve the outstanding problem, which was the not yet determined installation, on Friday we had a meeting with the client about a bunch of detailed questions. We were running out of time, and we should quickly make decision on it. This meeting was very successful; the client (which were the two teachers from EFSD) clearly stated their need and concerns about all the detailed questions. The team were now very clear about what to make.

And it’s Halloween –  we have an interesting picture of our meeting 🙂

The Saturday was the ETC playtest day. The team mainly tested the blade design system and the terrain simulator, which were the two major part of the experience. We had around 70 playtesters from 9~17 years old, a lot of which were our target audience (13 years old middle schoolers). The playtesters gave us the direct feedback on how they feel about each of the system, also stating some of their concern when filling the questionnaires. It was very helpful!

From the playtest day, some part of the experience seemed to be confusing to the players. The team needed to figure out how to improve that. See you next week!

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Hi all! This was the last week before the Halves and there were a lot to do for Flint.

On Monday the team reported to the advisors as usual for the progress and got feedback from them. In the rest of Monday and on Tuesday, the team kept on implementing the experience.

On Wednesday the team met Mr. Mike Christel to analyze the playtest result from the paper prototype playtest we did last week. Mike gave us valuable feedback and suggestions of how to improve the experience based on the results. Based on that, some of the designs were changed and we decided to work on new task accordingly.

On Thursday the team invited Jesse Schell for more discussion on the installation. Jesse brought us a bunch of idea on phidgets that we may apply in the system to deliver a cool, hands on experience. This was very inspiring!

On Friday the team had the regular meeting with the client and reported our progress. We also had the first blade design prototype ready to show on Halves!

The team was ready for the coming Halves. We had some solid progress and we spot the risk (which is, the installation plan was not determined) and planned to state it also solve it. See you next week!

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Hi all! Nice to see you again!

On Monday the team talked with the advisor and decided the outstanding task now is to decide the whole experience flow. Two team members starts to draw out every piece in the flow on paper so the whole team can look on it and discuss.

On Tuesday the team had the make-up meeting with the client and reported the newly designed flow. We agreed that we should quickly test this with the students to see how they feel on that. The team quickly built a paper prototype of the core experience, which is “wind blade design”, and planned to test these with the students on Thursday.

On Wednesday the team polished the prototype and prepared a questionnaire to collect the feedback. We planned to do a pre-post test to see if students get to know more about the topic after played the prototype. We also planned to video record the experience to see how they discuss through the experience.

On Thursday three team members went to EFSD and test the prototype with 34 students. We had many interesting discoveries in how students work through the design process, and students knew much more than we expected on the topic! A lot of valuable feedback was accepted from the students.

On Friday the team finished the first version of mock up UI, discussed about the playtest result and tried to refine the experience. The team also went to Jam-O-Drum in Alice Room and tested our top-down physical map idea. Unfortunately, it did not work as we expected; wind turbines were not clearly presented on such top-down projection. We need to find a new ay to do it.

The team needed to work out a new design of the installation quickly, and we were working towards it. See you next week!

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Week 6 in Flint…

Hi all! Nice to see you again! After the quarter Flint is trying to fix the ground and start some solid work.

On Monday the team shared the findings from research about “how to figure out the wind pattern from a give landscape.” Then we start to work out a gameflow which serves our teaching objectives based on the latest incoming information.

On Tuesday the team figured out a way to have the game more dynamic and competitive by introducing “revenue” into the gameplay. Students now need to deal with the trade-off of expensive / cheap turbines vs. high / low efficiency – which is from the 1/4 feedback – and it could be interesting! The team also tried to work out a new design of installation so that a curved projected screen is no longer needed.

On Wednesday the team continued to discuss about many details in the experience. Jesse Schell kindly came to our room and shared us an experience in which players could build roller coaster in an iterative way with good feedback. We got many idea from this experience.

On Thursday the team made some decision and prepared to present the result of all the discussions to the client and looked for their feedback.

On Friday for some reason, the team did not make it to talk to the client, but we divided our task and start working; crafting 3D models, designing installation, illustrating concept art and UI, developing prototypes. Solid products are on the way!

The team would like to see something that is real and working to get the feel of the experience. See you next week!

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