The semester went way faster than we even realized. It’s time for quarter’s presentation!
Quarter is the first time in the semester that we do a presentation to all the faculties. Teams will present what their progress is so far, give idea proposals, and then receive feedback. It is a good chance to see if we are on the right track and to make adjustment before any major development start. Every group of teacher have 15 mins to chat with us, and the next group of teacher come and chat with us.
Now you must have a picture in mind. Let’s take a look at what we presented on quarters!
Preparing for the Presentation
We first refined the problem space and organized the research that we did over the past two weeks. According to these information, we then designed our user experience and solution.
What’s our problem space?
This problem-solution diagram we drew is made for us to have a more holistic view of our project.
We are targeting at elementary school students that are making marionette puppet at the makerspace where they have access to Chromebooks.
We hope that the tool will be able to transform the experience into “this is fun”, make them believe that “this is doable”, and they will feel “this is easy” with their skills accelerate.
What do we find?
In addition to the research we did in the first week, we also looked into several more topics to help us gain a solid foundation of our project.
To cater to the needs, we looked up research about Learning Types and decided that we would focus more on the Visual and Kinesthetic learners.
To help development, we also dived into some of the Computer Graphics research since we first think of the idea to transform the whole sketch into a 3D model. However, it turned out that it would be way out of scope for us to do so.
What are we designing?
With all the background information we have, we came to a solution that to help the puppet creation process become more accessible for students, we are creating a tool that visualizes 2D sketches as 3D objects. The tool would be assisting the process between sketching and assembling.
The students would first draw their sketches on a piece of paper, take a picture of it, and then upload it to the webpage, which is where our tool start to take place.
The students will label each part of the puppet into head, arms, body, and legs. Then, they will pick the closest 3D objects to their drawings to represent each part.
Within the design phase, students will be able to scale each part of the body to match their design. The system will offer them the surface map of the object at the same time to help visualize the size of material they may need and the measurements that they need to cut out. The full view of the puppets will also be on the screen so that the students can have a holistic view of their design.
The students could also enter their height as the system will also show the real size of the puppet to see if the design fits their imagination.
Presentation Feedback
The feedback we received from the teachers was 50/50. They think that where we are heading to the right direction but still needs some refine. The feedbacks were mostly about the problem space as most of them found it not clear enough or too board to focus on. The teachers also mentioned about the problem that may come up if we gave the students free creative reign, for example it might be too daunting for the kids to design. This is also what we are struggling with right now. We are still finding ways to limit the kids’ creativity but not let them feel limited, perhaps adding some prompts can help.
After listening to all the feedbacks, we had a brief discussion about our next step. We really need to focus on clarifying our clients problem and priorities. Questions like, is the tool designed for classroom or makerspace, how important is creativity in this case, what kind of resources do they have, and how exactly is the workshop structured could really help us narrow down the problem and find the exact solution.
Team Bonding Time!
Besides from quarters, we have our team bonding dinner this week! We had a great dinner at Tocayo where they serve some really nice tacos and Mexican food. We talked about lots of things and definitely knew each other better. It was a wonderful night and ended the week perfectly.
Next Steps:
We had our client meeting late this week, so for the following week, our team is going to focus on designing and developing the core of our project.