Week 8

And we’re done with halves!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We presented first on Monday afternoon, had a little bit of clicker difficulty, but overall we were very happy with our presentation (mostly to be done with it…)! Watch a recording below.

During halves we were asked about:

• Whether we needed a digital umbrella represented in the space?
• The size of the final installation
• How we defined kindness/ transformational goals
• If we’ve considered multi-player interactions
• And if we’re considered children’s perspectives

Luckily, these were all things that we have been thinking about and had answers ready for.

But the work didn’t just stop there, we continued to refine our build for our playtest on Wednesday at the Children’s Museum. We returned to the museum to test our newest build with our goal-oriented interactions.

We found that children did understand the new interactions and were able to quickly figure out how to perform them. However, animations will be crucial to instilling empathy (our team is hard at work rigging + animating!). Currently, the sad visual effect is not enough, we will have to amp this up for the CMP Playtest Day.

Even though we’ve extended the rain cycle, it is still too short! We will either need to add more interactions or slow down the pacing further. But we will reconsider this after the CMP Playtest Day (3/20), since will be able to then expand to the final 22 ft long installation size. At that point, we will have to reconsider timing anyways.

We will also need to increase the size of the characters and change the texturing to provide more contrast to the background.

We did again find that caregivers guided play, and remarked that “it was nice” when they helped the characters.

We also found that children would share when encouraged, so we may not have to worry so much about sharing? But we will see when there are more children around…

We also ran into Anne, Joy, Greg, and Rebecca at the museum who gave us feedback. They asked us to add iconography to show where characters live, and a sun.

We also discussed with Greg what the umbrella prop will look like, he provided us with a rotary encoder and arduino, as well as source code for us to begin integrating into our build. We will hopefully on Monday after spring break, integrate our build with the physical set up.

We have a lot of changes to implement before the CMP Playtest Day and will be working hard to get them done in time.

But we’ll be away for spring break for the next week to relax a little before the final sprint.

Until then, be kind,
One Small Act