story-studio

Chapter 13 – Guests in the story

Week 13: April 17, 2023 – April 23, 2023

Blog entry by Damian Xie

Summary of the week: On Monday we had a soft opening where Drew, Shirley and Brenda came to our project room and were very pleased and impressed with the finished product. Felicia and Randi Revised UI based on Playtest Day feedback, switch to event-based system in the backend. Program-wise, Yanyan fixed all the obvious bugs. Felicia completed the documentation on the GIMP tutorial, and Lori and Lauren worked together to complete the documentation for all the circuit content. Damian completed the final content of the website, the project trailer, and will be working on an iteration of it. Lauren fixed the problem of RFID box. On Friday evening we hosted alumni back to campus to experience the results of our projects and received a lot of meaningful feedback and suggestions.

Soft Opening

On Monday we had our soft opening event where Drew, Shirley and Brenda came to our project room to experience the results of our project and overall, they were very excited and happy with the results so far, even Shirley said, “I don’t know what to say, I think you guys are did a great job!” We like that a lot, but we are still aware that there are still some programmatic issues to be solved, and that will be our main focus for the rest of the semester.

To summarize the feedback:

  1. Very positive feedback
    1. Very engaged with the story and the interactions
    2. UI looks very polished and professional
    3. Really liked the concept, could even envision other applications of this tool like grandparents making stories for their grandchildren
  2. Ideas for future iterations
    1. Undo button
    2. Customizing text size/font
    3. Flipping/rotating assets
    4. Ability to go back to the previous page in play mode
    5. Video tutorial for the tool (which we already have plans to do)
  3. Noted bugs in the playtest
    1. Play function
Shirley seems really interested in our product.

Revise the UI based on Playtest Day feedback

Felicia and Randi completed the hardware and software part of the UI interaction iteration, and yanyan was responsible for modifying the existing content from the programmatic side, and overall we finally finished the final iteration of the UI.

GIMP Tutorial

Felicia has just finished a tutorial on image footage extraction, based on the use of the GIMP tool detailing the use of this free tool that can facilitate our creators to get their image footage quickly when they get a new storybook.

Here is the link of tutorial：

Content Creator: Remove Background In GIMP – Google Docs: Chapter 13 – Guests in the story
GIMP is similar to Photoshop

Programming progress

Our programmer fixed the most bugs in our bug list, which means we almost make our tool functional now! (YAY), but still have some problems in it, like save & load function is not working as we expect. We will keep trying and fixing bugs until the last minute. Thanks to Yanyan’s hard work that gives us current beautiful and efficient tool now.

Circuit Documentation

In order to ensure that our Arduino prototypes can be perfectly used in the whole tool, and for the convenience of the followers, we have written a special document to better explain how to connect the prototypes to each other and how to edit the Uduino code, this new document will introduce the original content in more detail and revise more details.

Alumni Experience Day

On Friday night we held an Alumni Back to School event inviting all alumni to come back and test and experience all of ETC’s existing programs. We showed demos of existing stories and allowed several alumni to experience our tools, receiving many compliments but also some feedback.

  1. Alumni feedback:
    1. Very positive feedback
      1. Very engaged with the story and the interactions
      2. UI looks very polished and professional
      3. Really liked the concept, could even envision other applications of this tool like grandparents making stories for their grandchildren.
    2. Ideas for future iterations
      1. Undo button
      2. Customizing text size/font
      3. Flipping/rotating assets
      4. Ability to go back to the previous page in play mode
      5. Video tutorial for the tool (which we already have plans to do)
    3. Noted bugs in the playtest
      1. Play function

To summarize, this week we mainly focus on our final iteration and bugs fixing process and we host another playtest with bunch of people including our faculties and alumni, we received a lot of positive feedback and compliment, which gives us much confidence to continue work!