Funny Challenge Changes

Funny Challenge Changes

As suggested last meeting, I changed the challenge I am using in the tutorial to encourage kids to get into the story and enjoy it. I am including colorful happy scenario and characters from cute animals to a scary troll to get a more interesting story with suspense and a funny surprising ending. I also needed to preserve the purpose of this challenge which is teaching how to get started in Looking Glass using basic actions, so I started with animals showing cool things they could do (tricks) such as resizing and spinning. I tried to put a little of suspense on the story by calling their attention to a hidden character inside the cave who was an ugly, scary and huge troll. This situation was kind of putting the animals under risk. In order to finish with an unexpected end, the cat, only character who did not show her trick, decided to use it. We thought her trick was going to save the group, but it could only help her to escape the troll by disappearing, leaving the end of the other little animals up to the kids imagination.

Hopefully I will have a functional version of this updated tutorial to be running tomorrow at the Science Center, as soon as possible, I will be posting the link here.

Science Center

And about the last Saturday at the Science Center, we were lucky for running the demo with 4 kids, but only 2 with me. Then I understood how boring my previous video was. No laughs. However, I could still catch their attention until the end. What surprised me were their abilities in exploring the tool. Both tried a couple of actions that were not in the tutorial, which is a good signal. They used the following extra actions: resize (easy to increase, but difficult to make smaller – hard to figure out that they have to choose values under 1.0 to decrease and 1.0 is to keep the current size, doing no changes), turnToFace, moveAwayFrom, pointAt (not as they expected – pointing finger to someone maybe?).

The specific questions were more about things that I didn’t show in the tutorial, such as the resize to smaller (as I commented before), how to delete an action chose by mistake and what was the setVehicle (after explanation the kid concluded something like: “oh, it’s like follow the leader game!”), another issue is when one of them clicked on the append option of text screen, adding more text to the previous text, and couldn’t figure out how to remove it. Both of them also suggested putting more different things together in the tutorial. It seems they wanted to go deeper into the tutorial. Too few or too many is ever the most complicated question to be answered.