Week 05

Clarifying the Experience

This week, we moved from defining the overall direction of STAiGE toward shaping a more coherent product experience. While previous weeks focused on narrowing our audience, clarifying the input-and-output pipeline, and exploring script generation, this week we began connecting those pieces into a clearer design logic.

Through internal discussions, prototype reviews, and playtests with ETC faculty, we refined how STAiGE should support teachers from lesson content to classroom performance. We also continued developing the project’s visual identity and presentation materials in preparation for Halves.

Refining Our Design Logic

One of our main focuses this week was clarifying how the different parts of STAiGE connect together.

Rather than thinking of the system as simply “AI generates a script,” we are now designing STAiGE as a structured workflow that helps teachers transform academic content into an interactive theatrical learning experience.

Our current design logic begins with what teachers already have:

From there, STAiGE helps organize the content into a theatrical structure, including characters, relationships, actions, changes, and spatial information.

This shift helped us better define the role of AI in the experience. The goal is not to replace the teacher’s decisions, but to provide structure, suggestions, and adaptable materials that make drama-based learning easier to create and facilitate.

Playtesting with ETC Faculty

This week, we also reached out to several ETC faculty members and conducted early playtests and feedback sessions.

These conversations were especially valuable because they allowed us to test not only whether people understood the interface, but whether the overall idea of STAiGE was clear and meaningful.

Some of the key questions we explored included:

One recurring takeaway was that we need to make the teacher’s role clearer throughout the workflow. Teachers should be able to understand, edit, and adapt what the AI generates rather than receiving a finished output as a “black box.”

We also received feedback that our project becomes much easier to understand when we frame it through a real classroom scenario rather than starting with technical features. This has influenced both our product design and the way we are preparing our Halves presentation.

Strengthening the STAiGE Identity

Alongside the product work, we continued building the visual identity of STAiGE.

This week, we completed:

These materials helped us establish a clearer and more recognizable identity for the project. We wanted the visual style to feel playful and approachable, while still communicating that STAiGE is an educational tool designed for teachers.

Developing these materials also pushed us to simplify how we explain the project. Short descriptions, diagrams, and visual storytelling forced us to identify the most important message behind STAiGE.

Preparing for Halves

A large part of this week was also dedicated to preparing for our Halves presentation.

Instead of presenting STAiGE as a list of features, we began restructuring the presentation around a story:

A teacher already has lesson content and learning goals.
They want students to experience the lesson more actively.
But creating a classroom drama requires additional time, structure, and theatrical knowledge.

STAiGE is designed to bridge that gap.

This storytelling approach helped us make the motivation behind the project clearer and gave us a stronger structure for explaining our research, design principles, prototype, and future direction.

Key Takeaways

This week helped us clarify several important principles for the project:

Drama should support learning, not distract from it.
The academic goal needs to remain visible throughout the experience.

Teachers need control and flexibility.
AI-generated content should be editable and understandable.

The experience needs to be practical.
A successful system must consider real classroom constraints such as time, space, class size, and student age.

Playtesting needs to drive our design.
Feedback from educators is becoming increasingly important as we move from concept development toward a usable classroom experience.

Looking Ahead

After Halves, our focus will shift heavily toward repeated playtesting and iteration.

We plan to continue testing with ETC faculty, teachers, and eventually students to better understand how STAiGE works in real classroom scenarios.

Our next priorities include:

The goal for the next phase is to move beyond showing that STAiGE can generate content and begin proving that the complete experience can actually support teaching and learning in a classroom.