The team spent the first half of the week getting familiar with Roblox and Roblox Studio, brainstorming potential ideas, and meeting with our instructors as a group for the first time. Rohit and Chenguang focused on looking at Roblox Studio’s programming capabilities while Anlan and Lyn researched Roblox’s unique art style. Gillian and Xiao looked into what interactive tools and games were being used in the classroom to begin understanding what niche our tool could fill.
This week also marked our first meeting with our client, Genevieve Johnson. Genevieve was able to answer most of our questions as well as give us a more specific audience and tech requirements. She also gave us some good starting resources for Roblox onboarding and for games we should look to for inspiration.
Rohit worked on finalizing our composition board draft from last Friday so that he, Gillian, and Chenguang could participate in the Playtest to Explore Workshop. We got some good feedback to help narrow our direction.
On Friday, the team got together to brainstorm example topics that students could use our tool for, plan a rapid prototyping sprint for the next week, and prepare for ¼ presentations. The topic we eventually chose was the Labor Movement of the Progressive Era. We chose this topic because it has local significance to Pittsburgh, is taught in American high schools making it appropriate for our target audience, and is becoming particularly relevant to how our current economy is functioning. Both the instructors and team are very excited to explore this topic.
In addition to all of that, Anlan created our first iterations of our team logo.
Overall it was a productive week and the team has made some steps forward as we begin ideating on the end goals of our project.