Sketches out the Wazoo

This week has been very light on the coding and heavy on the brainstorming. I started out this week by thinking about what programming concepts we would want to have as badges. I worked backwards by playing around in Looking Glass and really exploring what different options there are. (I actually discovered a lot that I was previously unaware of.) From that list, I tried to categorize them by concepts that we want the user to learn and that would be testable. I drew out how those concepts might look as badges, but I ran into some difficulty when I tried to rank them my difficulty. Unfortunately I’m several years ahead in age and programming experience from our target audience (middle school kids). Thus, I don’t know if I have the best idea of what concepts are or are not difficult.

The rest of the week was spent really hammering down what I wanted to do for the project proposal. Since badges is a new concept, there is a lot of freedom to explore and create. However, that also means that the possibilities are endless. I sketched out a lot of different version of the pages, making sure they all fit together as a whole. Later, Genevieve, Mary and I had an extensive brainstorming session. We talked about our visions for our respective projects to make sure that our proposals would complement rather than conflict. We also came up with some cool ideas for incorporating more interactivity (like hovering over) into the site as well as designs for the user index and the worlds show page.

I plan on spending Friday creating user-testing videos on Looking Glass.