Here we are! Finished with the last week of work before final presentations! We spent this week refining our documentation, making some modifications to our prototypes based on feedback from Soft Opening, and preparing for our final presentation.

Showcase

In addition to getting ready to wrap up the semester, on Wednesday of this week we had the ETC Spring Showcase, where all of the projects showed off their work from the semester to industry professionals visiting the ETC. We had lots of people come through to try our prototypes, including some educators who were very interested in keeping up with the project and potentially working with the Alice team in the future. It was a great night!

Minor Changes

We continued to act on the feedback we got from faculty last week at soft opening, adding sound effects and minor visual clarifications to the prototypes, as well as fixing any bugs that had come up. We had a difficult decision to make regarding some of the faculty feedback, as several members of the faculty wanted us to make fairly significant changes to the interactions of the prototypes. Ultimately, we decided that it is more important to us to spend that time on our documentation rather than on reworking prototypes, so instead we’ve included those recommendations in our technical documentation as advice for continued development. Additionally, some of the feedback has made us realize that we still need to be clearer about what are and aren’t the goals of our project, so we’re focusing on that for our final presentation.

Preparing for Finals

Monday of next week we’ll be presenting the results of our semester of work to the faculty in one last presentation, followed by final playthroughs on Friday, when faculty that couldn’t make it to final presentations or who want to see more of our work will visit our project room to see our work for themselves. This is our final opportunity to show off what we’ve been working on all semester (and prove we haven’t been wasting our time)!

It’s been a great semester for all of us, we’ve all learned a lot and really grown as a team. Hopefully our prototypes will serve the Computer Science Education community well, and can actually inspire those who wonder how we can use virtual reality to teach computer science.