It’s the last week before final presentations! There’s not many new things that happened these past few days, which we think is a good thing – as mentioned previously, we dedicated it to polishing and refining, and to start working on final deliverables for the ETC such as the archive and the final slideshow. We also started coordinating the delivery of the printed physical materials to our client, as well as picking up the tablets CATT bought so Jimmy and Eric can install our app in them and create the documentation for anyone else to install the app in a tablet if necessary.
Final Playtesting Session
The highlight of our week was a visit to Hosanna House on Wednesday afternoon, just as we had done several weeks before, for a final playtest of our project. Our goal was to finally test the experience in a setting where several groups were participating, with all the final materials. Our observations from this session can help us make minor edits in the app that are absolutely necessary, but most importantly, the session helped us understand how educators and facilitators will experience our project – and therefore which information we must add in our teacher guide to help them.
This was an incredible opportunity for all of our team to understand how multiple teams undergo our experience at once: we had 3 teams of 3 kids each, and these students were all in 3rd or 4th grade (thus, within our target demographic!). In fact, three of these kids were in our first playtesting group at Hosanna House, which is such a nice way to end our playtesting process. They got to see how the project started and ended, and we could get a sense of their views on the project’s evolution.
Not everything went smoothly – it was late in the day (4:00pm) and these kids were in “afterschool play mode”, so some of them were more inclined to joke around than to pay attention to the app’s instructions. We learned that teachers must introduce the experience as a challenge in which students have to be attentive and collaborate, and not as a fun activity (i.e. a game), as we did. Additionally, we had some tensions amongst students when groups were being set up, which hopefully won’t be such a big issue when teachers are instructed by our teacher guide to set up the groups prior to visiting CATT. Finally, the room in which we carried out the playtest was considerably smaller than CATT’s space, and therefore the sound bleeding from a team’s tablet into another team’s space was distracting and uncomfortable for some students.
But overall, the kids reported having fun – which we could see as we observed them -, and learning, especially those who payed attention from the start and those who received some help from our team to follow instructions. It was extremely satisfying to see them go through the different stages of the experience and culminate in the flight stage, which they all thoroughly enjoyed and were impressed by.
