Week 3 – 1/4s Walkaround and Three Potential Directions

Intro

After the background research, we now think that we have a solid understanding of the problem space and we are ready to present our problem space to faculty for 1/4s walkaround!

Halves Preparation

We prepared for halves by collecting everything we learned from research and summarizing them into big posters that we hang on the wall.

We broke everything down into 8 sections:

Project Statement
User Persona
Use Case & Platform
Biggest Challenge
Research – 3D Scene Building Experiences
Research – Programming Games
Research – Realtime Collaboration Tools
Three Potential Directions

Halves Feedback

Wednesday came and we presented our work to the faculty, who then gave us a lot of great feedback. Here’s a quick summary

Questions

Why collaborate?
Why block programming? Would middle schoolers find block programming way too easy?
Would making them work in silos get away from collaboration?
What’s the focus?
- Learn to collaborate?
- Collaborate to learn?
Are middle school students really opposed to collaboration?

Suggestions

Watch middle schoolers play Minecraft
Use Figma as a testing ground
Take advantage of ARENA
Talk to coaches/teachers
Consider anonymize students
They might have opinions of each other
NHSGA is a high school version of this experience

References

Color Water Pipe, past etc project that inspired schell games
PICO CTF 2021 Project
Previous Alice ETC Project
Wick Editor
Muppets
Codespark
World Peace Games

Takeaway

Overall the biggest takeaway we had were that The relationship between Collaboration and Learning is unclear. There was a huge difference between “Collaborating to learn” and “Learning to collaborate” because collaboration is also a skill and we should decide if we want to use our experience to teach it as a skill, or just use collaboration as a way to help students learn other educational contents