Week 9: March 20, 2023 – March 26, 2023

Blog entry by Damian Xie

Summary of the week: Lori has been to IAAPA, Yanyan and Damian have been to GDC last week. We clarified a number of issues with the client at Friday’s meeting (including the storybooks that can be used, the software supported, and who will be responsible for the storytelling, etc.) Besides, the team hosted 20 educators from various grades. Lori continues doing the documentation for how to tell a good story from Pixar in a Box. We’re Prototyping Arduino sensor interactions and Prototyping potential hardware casings and props/characters. We have updated the new UI design and Connected code with the new interface.

 Professional Development

This week the general members of our group went out to conferences to gain more insight into professional development, Lori to IAAPA and Yanyan and Damian to GDC. Everyone gained a lot of valuable industry information and connected with many people working in the industry at the event.

Clarified questions with client

After completing our group meeting on Monday, we summarized the problems that needed to be answered in the follow-up development, and then we wrote an email to ask the client and clarify them in the client meeting this week, the following questions were listed and the client’s answers:

• Q: What kinds of stories can we use?
  • A: Any stories under educational fair use, the client said they would not use the demos we produced for commercial use.
• Q: Where can we test/do the event?
  • A: We are going to use Assembly Hall.
• Q: Who would the storyteller be?
  • A: A museum educator
• Q: Making equipment available to CMP?
  • A: 3D Printer and Laser Cutter both can be used, depends on specific situation.
• Q: Which software we should use for getting the image assets that content creators can use for their story design, Photoshop or Gimp/free software?
  • A: Free software.
• Q: Are we have any Projector screens?
  • A: Just use the built in projector screens in Assembly Hall.

Host an event for educators

On Wednesday, 20 educators visited ETC, and we invited them to our project room for a tour and presentation of our project, and after some interviews we got many useful suggestions from them. One of the most constructive suggestions was on how to effectively involve children in the overall storytelling activity. They think movement is great and make sure to pay attention to transitions between activities.

Documentation for how to tell a good story

Lori has further refined the document on how to tell a good story from Pixar in a Box, which will better help storytellers to give children a good storytelling experience.

Arduino sensor interactions (Software)

This week Randi, Felicia and Lauren worked together on the software side of the Arduino prototype: Lauren worked on the RFID reader content, Randi and Felicia worked on the microphone functionality, and Randi completed the implementation of the Arduino pipeline in Unity. At this point we have some software content that can be used for testing.

Potential hardware casings and props/characters

In order to test the condition of the existing Arduino Sensors we tried to make a physical model of the entity, consisting of three parts in total: the Props that make up the physical interactive appearance, the Arduino connector, and the box with the Arduino device.

Randi, Felicia, and Lauren worked together to create props for our mascot, Alfred, and connected them to our existing Arduino system to complete our first prototype to test sending commands from Unity to the Arduino and then the dolls would respond accordingly.

UI Design Updates

Felicia made another iteration of the current UI based on some existing requirements to make it more in line with our existing project needs.

Once We get done by new UI design, Yanyan and Randi are Connecting code with the new interface.

We’ve made good progress this week even though we had a lot of team members out at conferences and only half of the team stayed, but we’re a little bit tighter at the moment and we need to make more content in a short period of time so that we can have a complete product to show at soft opening.

Next week is the first week after spring break and various meetings and events, so we will be focusing on moving the project forward.