Week 5 Summary

This week was critical for the team. As we split the team into two groups, we realized that our prototype did not had much to prove, because we need more polished interactions for our hypothesis. Therefore, instead of splitting into two groups, we pivoted our plan to have four developers, one designer, and one producer to enhance the process.

Developing prototypes, we noticed that gesture language is important factor in the educational design pattern.

Geometry Prototype

Geometry prototype aims for using real objects to visualize angles while changing the geometry shape. In the future, students should visualize the change of angles by interacting with the vertex of the triangle, which is the real object: a student will place a trackable physical sphere. After placing an additional sphere, physical object that represents the vertex of a geometry, virtual line will show up to indicate that you made a line. Adding third sphere will create a geometry and will show the angle. Whenever the student moves the vertex, there will be a panel showing the change of the angle.

However, due to technical difficulties of the image tracking, we used virtual vertices instead. The pattern that we found here is limiting the interaction to one hand will hinder the learning process, because the guest has to hold up their hand to see the change, which sabotages the interactive learning interaction.

3D Line Prototype

Line prototype had questions on visualizing content and interaction. Based on the playtesting, visual cues are highly important for the 3D axis. To avoid abundant of instruction texts, making guest recognize different axis, interactive elements, and recognizing graph information can be achieved through anticipation cues and color design. Image above shows how we created the anticipation animation to let the guest know that he or she is interacting with the line. Distinct color for each axis serves better for indirect graph information.

Quarters Presentation

For the quarters, our faculties played the line prototype and geometry prototype. Main concerns from faculties after quarters is on deliverable and scope. We initially thought our deliverable is only the design document. However, the design document itself might not fulfill our prototype use. Since we are also exploring gesture language inside the classroom, we also though about delivering gesture package to our client. Using the unity package, other developers can easily make education application without thinking much about the gesture interaction. In other words, the only thing they need to implement is content.

Elizabeth Forward High School Visit

Elizabeth Forward High School educators visited our project room to give us much insight in designing AR educational work-frame.

Educators loved the visualization of math. The most interesting prototype was geometry demo. Their comment was “the change of an angle while manipulating the geometry is the strength of using augmented reality inside the classroom.”

Great Valley School District Visit

After quarters, this week focused on wrapping up major design for the Lines prototype and moving into research for the biomes prototype.

We also conducted a focus group session without about 30 high school students that visited the ETC. The planned interview questions were:

 

  • Is there a subject you find difficult / uninteresting in the classroom?
    Could you tell me a story about a time you were frustrated?

  • Is there a subject you think has the potential to be more interesting?
    Could you give me an example?


*Introduce them to the idea of AR, and how it can be applied in the classroom*

  • How do you think the technology would be useful in the classroom?

  • How do you think the subjects we talked about could benefit from it?
    Could you describe a scenario?

  • Think about a subject you really enjoy – how could it benefit from this technology?

 

This yielded a fruitful conversation. It was not exactly a playtest to explore – students are more useful to discover problems in the current system that we can attempt to solve using Augmented Reality.

 

To flesh out the biomes prototype, the team brainstormed features they were excited about exploring in a layer model. We then looked through PA and CA curriculum related to biomes, and compiled the information.

An early sketch for what the high level design might look like accommodated all the interactions the team discussed (in red marker), which could then be further prioritised to explore.

 

The challenge with this prototype is to balance general layer-related design with more specific biome interactions. While we want to gain information about the high-level design pattern (layers), we also want to explore the strengths of learning this specific topic in an AR medium.