Week 13 (Apr. 6, 2026 – Apr. 10, 2026)

After an exhausting Week 12, the team started Week 13 with a lot of energy, mostly focused on planning our soft presentation for next week.

Monday morning started with our producers, Aidan and Sudarshan, putting together a clear plan for how the soft presentation could look. They shared the plan and assigned roles to everyone before we met Mo and Brenda for our weekly instructor meeting.

During that meeting, Mo and Brenda came to our project room and reviewed our progress from last week. We walked them through our soft presentation plan, and they pointed out that we might be trying to show too much, which could distract guests and make it harder to communicate our key findings. Based on their feedback, we decided to cut things down and make the presentation smoother and more focused.

For progress updates, we talked about our new demo performance using prompts inspired by Waiting for Godot and the Meisner exercise. We also shared updates on the Twitch recordings where two AIs talk to each other on their own, our design document, and the Arduino integration. The meeting felt easy overall, but it led to some good questions and discussions, especially around our performance clips from last week.

On Tuesday and Thursday, we met with our consultant Charles Johnson to go over our progress after halves and get feedback on our soft presentation. He said he found our work interesting, especially the experiments, audience feedback, and everything we’ve learned so far. He suggested that we include short clips or moments from each week to better summarize our journey during the presentations.

When he asked how we felt about the project so far, one thing Sudarshan and Aidan shared was that this process made them appreciate being human—being able to feel emotions and express them. AI, at least right now, still lacks that emotional depth and may be for all rightful reasons.

On Thursday, we also met with Mark Pioznor to share our soft presentation plan and get more feedback, which was really helpful.

Later that evening, we went to a live improv show at Carnegie Hall of Music in Homestead as a team bonding activity. It was a show by Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood, the dynamic duo from TV’s “Whose Line is it Anyway?,” taking the stage in a one-night-only uproarious live show, Colin Mochrie & Brad Sherwood: Asking for Trouble. It was a great experience and helped us see how different improv feels when two humans are performing together. You could clearly see how they supported each other on stage—if one actor paused, laughed, or got stuck, the other stepped in and helped move things forward. It was also cool to see exercises we practice in class being performed live in front of a large audience.

Friday was more relaxed. Some team members worked from home while others came into ETC. CMU’s Spring Carnival was happening from Thursday to Saturday, and since some classes were canceled, it felt like a good day to take it easy and enjoy the campus if we wanted to.

Overall, the week was full of different tasks—running new playtests, talking to team EchoTrio to understand their director system, exploring if similar ideas could improve our AI performance, working with IT on Arduino beak movement for our puppet, setting up Twitch streams for AI conversations, testing new narratives (like a caveman or negotiation scenarios), cleaning up UI code, organizing documentation, updating Kory Mathewson and Piotr Mirowski, and continuing work on our design document. We also reached out to a CMU theater instructor to learn more about what makes a strong performance.

Next week, we’re excited for our soft presentation on Wednesday, April 15th from 2 PM to 6 PM. After that, the focus will shift to preparing for finals, which are just two weeks away.

With nicer weather and all the Carnival fun, Week 13 came to a nice end.