Week 12 was a shorter week due to Carnegie Mellon’s Spring Carnival happening on Thursday and Friday of the week. Thus, we spent most of our time focused on making relatively small changes to our prototypes in anticipation for soft opening next week. We also went to the Moonshot Museum again to demo our prototypes to our client. 

Prototype Changes

At the current stage of the project, we limited the changes to our prototypes to smaller adjustments. Due to time constraints, any larger proposed changes can be detailed in our documentation (a key deliverable of this project). 

For AR Moon Colony, we continued making small updates to the UI. Throughout the project, UI for the Tilt Five has been a challenge for us. We found that guests do not always see UI that is not directly on top of whatever they are currently interacting with. However, we tried to mitigate our issues by copying the UI tools so they appear on both sides of the board as well as continuing to adjust UI color coding. 

For Mission Control, we worked on the implementation of the mini-games as well as the development of a different final puzzle. The earlier puzzle had been too simple for older guests (high school and above) to be enjoyable, leading to a more complex final puzzle to be created. We were able to test this puzzle with high school students. The students were able to solve the puzzle, demonstrated teamwork while solving the puzzle, and seemed to enjoy the process. 

Visiting the Moonshot Museum

On Wednesday April 12th, we took our three prototypes to the Moonshot Museum for our client (Mike) to test out. We were also able to demonstrate our prototypes for a group of educators who had been visiting the museum at that time.

We set up Payload Packing and AR Moon Colony for the demonstration. Unfortunately, we couldn’t play Mission Control while we were at the museum, but we explained the experience and mini-games as well as briefly testing the more complex puzzle that had been designed. 

Review & Looking Ahead

For Week 12, we were able to make limited changes and additions to our prototypes. We also had opportunities to demonstrate and test our prototypes with our client, educators, and visiting high school students. Overall, the results were positive. 

However, we also acknowledge that there is still room for improvement. Since we are creating three prototypes in one semester, we’ve had limited time to work on each prototype. As such, we have many ideas that can only be included via documentation. 

In Week 13, we must first focus on soft openings on Monday April 17th before anything else. After that, our first priority must shift to documentation. Any additional changes to our prototypes will have to be minor and easy to execute from this point forward.