It was the week before spring break and we were starting to feel the crunch, both with the demands of the projects and also the assignments and mid-sems of the different courses that we have taken on this semester. Another thing that was on our radar was the halves presentation in Week 10, which is fast approaching. For those of you who’re not familiar with halves, it is a mid semester evaluation of our work so far, and our thoughts ahead. We as a team have 15 mins to present our work in front of all the faculty and our peers, so we go on stage and talk about what we achieved so far and our discoveries. It is a valuable opportunity for feedback, and we’re taking it very seriously. We had meetings with our faculty about this, and they gave us plenty of guidelines and tips that we should take care of while preparing and presenting for halves.
We worked on re-prioritizing our goals for the end of the summer, and talked to our client about the issues. A good way to find answers is to plot user stories and help fine tune everything from the UI to our design directions. Sophie got to work on that and made a few paper prototypes for the User Interface.
These were made based on the plans and the outline of the UI we already had in mind (we have already started prototyping with this). Going through the entire sequence again, from before someone opens the application to when they reach the point when the game is done, repeatedly using these paper prototypes was immensely helpful. We also tried going through it using the lens of different play-testers. For example, what if the child is using the software for the first time? For the second time? Or for the tenth time? Will we ask the user the same questions then? We also thought about situations in which the student was doing it in the presence of teachers, and the absence of teachers.
Based on the above factors, we made a list of the features we ask the users to decide. We’re still iterating on this and also awaiting feedback from faculty about this.
On the technology front, the programmers finished integrating the Pixi engine with the front end, and now are scripting in the functions for the code-blocks (our adventure game vernacular) for the behavior. Next week we’ll rope in all of these, and maybe even have a little demo for the halves. We’ll also be preparing our presentation slides and content for the same. So, see you then!