the end (for now)

This week was the last week of the REU program. After the craziness that was the buildup to the research symposium, this week was much slower.

I spent the first part of the week making the badges info page show which skills the user has earned. I debated for a bit about whether or not I wanted to indicate that the user had a world with that skill, or if the user had a badge with that skill. (For instance, if the user had a world with “get a part”, but didn’t have the full badge yet, that skill would still be highlighted). For now, I decided to just highlight the skills if the user had a badge with it. However, it might be a nice tool to show the kid how far they are to getting a certain badge. Even if we don’t end up displaying the skills that weren’t counted in the badge-earning, we could still use that info to help suggest badges to kids. For instance, if we know they have 3 of the 4 required skills, we could suggest that they put those skills together in the same world, learn the new one and earn the badge.

I also discovered that some of the layout stuff I had implemented in haste last week had bugs in them, so I spent some time weeding through those. I also fixed some of my methods for awarding badges to use the subclasses for optional skills (e.g. roll or turn) instead of storing them in some wonky arrays.

In order to organize the myriad of random thoughts that pop into my head, I made a todo list for badges. That way, when I come back to the lab in a couple of weeks, I will have a reminder of what I was working on/what still needs to happen.

The other part of my week was spent preparing for/running user studies at the science center. It was really interesting seeing how the kids actually react to Looking Glass and to the challenges. The video tutorials that Jordana made seemed to really help the kids use Looking Glass from the get-go. They didn’t have the initial confusion of “how do I animate things” that we’ve seen before. It was also interesting to see how fast the kids would go when they had a story in mind and how stuck they would get if they couldn’t think of what to do. One of the kids was going for a while, but then he ran out of steam with the original idea and didn’t have anything to inspire him further. This almost argues for having special methods in the challenges that could trigger further additions to the story. (For instance, a “super speed” method for the race)