Week 7 – October 10, 2022

On Monday, we presented our half presentation to the ETC faculty. It went well overall, but there seemed to be some confusion about the reason behind why we have our demo/test story. Some faculty seemed to think that the demo was our final project, while others saw our our demo as one of several deliverables. In actuality, our project is mainly focused on creating a tool that can be used in school, however, we have been using the logistical needs of a working demo to guide our feature development and art pipelines. We can also use the test story as a reference in our final documentation, especially regarding potential use cases in classrooms. Our client at Roblox is thus expecting a tool, a test story, and documentation discussing both.

Additionally, there was a fair amount of faculty concern about us using the Homestead Strike as the topic of the test story and our test story being from the perspective of someone suppressing wages. The team was actually excited to see some of the tension over the subject, because some of the moral discussions and criticisms levied were what we’d expect conversations between high school students studying the same topic. 

There were some other criticisms focused on how appropriate Roblox is as a platform for discussing tense issues like workers’ rights and historical instances of extreme violence which the team understands as valuable criticism for Roblox in the classroom in general. While we can’t directly address this issue on the whole without our client drastically changing their own goals, it is an important issue to notify Roblox about, so we are glad that our test story could bring this conversation about. 

One way the team has decided to more directly attempt to address this concern, is to go out and talk with teachers. We had our first chat with Ms. Lindy Olsen, a former Latin teacher and school counselor. She was overall very enthusiastic about our tool and thought it would work incredibly well in any language class where students need to practice composition. Her enthusiasm was particularly great because it showed the team that our tool had uses that the team, faculty, and Roblox had not previously considered.

After talking with the Latin teacher and considering some of the faculty’s concerns about our current test story, the team has also decided to add an additional test story to our deliverable. This story will be focused on using the tool for practicing grammar and vocabulary in a Latin I classroom. Ms. Olsen was wonderful enough to provide a couple of example assignments and tell us how she would like each to be adapted for our tool. So for the next few weeks, the team will continue to discuss possible tool uses with teachers and pivot into a foreign language test story after wrapping up the Homestead Strike.

The team wrapped up the week by planning out our composition box for Mike’s playtesting workshop. The workshop is on the Monday we return from Fall Break, so the team thought it was best to plan ahead so we wouldn’t be stressing over it the morning we return.

Composition Box Planning