Navigating Softs and Moving Forward
This week felt both long and short for the team. To begin with, on Monday we had our weekly instructor meeting with Brenda. Mo was attending CHI in Barcelona, so he was not present at ETC for the week. During the meeting, we reviewed our progress and updates from the previous week and discussed our plans for the Soft Presentation. Since our project is exploratory—something quite rare for ETC projects—we faced challenges in deciding what exactly to present for softs. Although we had initial ideas, we needed to make a firm decision. In the end, we continued with our original plan, making slight adjustments to better focus our content.
To present a complete picture of our progress, we followed Brenda’s suggestion and structured our presentation around three key questions:
- What did we know coming in?
- What did we want to find out?
- What did we do to answer these questions?
As a team, we identified the essential details to address each of these points.
On Tuesday, we met with Mark Piszczor and shared our updated plan for softs. He noted that we were approaching soft presentations quite differently compared to past projects, which made sense given the exploratory nature of our work.
On Wednesday, we delivered our soft presentation. We set up stations in our project room, with each team member responsible for a specific section. The format involved 30-minute sessions with one visiting faculty member at a time, and in total, five faculty members visited us. Overall, the team felt that about 85% of our presentation and progress was positively received. One faculty member mentioned that we had come a long way and contributed meaningful work to the project. Another pointed out areas for improvement, noting that parts of our demo—specifically the video—felt less meaningful and somewhat unnecessary. We took all feedback constructively and reflected on how we could improve moving forward.
On Friday, ETC hosted an alumni event celebrating its 25th anniversary. Our project was designated as an Open House project, meaning guests could visit at any time, though access depended on our availability. Since the event came together somewhat last-minute, we decided to reuse our soft presentation setup. This worked well—alumni visitors appreciated our work, some even laughed and seemed to genuinely enjoy the experience. Brenda later shared that she received a lot of positive feedback from alumni who visited our room.
Beyond presentations, the team continued working on the design document, ensured the UI functioned as expected, experimented with Arduino, and recorded a demo over the weekend.
Looking ahead to next week, we plan to begin preparing for the final presentation, wrap up remaining tasks, and further refine the Arduino experience.
With strong positive feedback from both faculty and alumni, we wrapped up Week 14 on a high note.