Mailing List:
etc-a-squared-studio@lists.andrew.cmu.edu

Physical address:
​700 Technology Dr, Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Week 6 – Playable Demo & Second Playtest

Intro

Hi all! We have made a lot of great progress this week and we are super excited to share them with everyone.

Our original plan was to finish the first playable prototype by the end of this week and conduct our second round of playtesting in the upcoming week. But on Tuesday a surprising opportunity arose – ETC’s Director of Educational Engagement John Balash let us know that on Wednesday a group of middle school students is going to tour the ETC and they are interested to visit ETC project rooms and help us playtest our experience. Therefore we decided to speed up the development and managed to finish a fully playable build by Wednesday and successfully conducted our second playtest.

Playable Demo

In this first playable demo students can:

  • Customize their user name
  • Host / join a lobby
  • Select skybox color / ground plane texture
  • Place 3D Objects in the scene
  • Move & rotate objects

Playtest

On Wednesday we conducted our second round of playtest with 5 groups of middle school students and each playtest consisted of four steps:

  1. Students first answer a few background questions to help us understand their age, experience with programming, and interest in (reading & telling) stories.
  2. They then pick a story prompt collaboratively with a paper prototype.
  3. They move on to 2 computers and create a 3D Scene based on the prompt
  4. They answer a few questions about the experience
Paper Prototype

And to summarize our findings:

  • They all thought the experience was intuitive and fun
  • Most of them found the prompt-picking process engaging and helpful to inspire stories
  • Most of them found some interaction design frustrating, for example, moving the object was not intuitive at all because the collider boxes of objects are not visible
  • Most importantly, they were all intrigued and expressed that they would love to learn how to add animation to the scene if possible.

This playtest gave us a lot of confidence in our direction and the feedback we received from students proved a lot of our assumptions. We will further discuss our findings during this playtest and start preparing for halves presentation next week.