Week 10

Halves!  At week 10!  Which is more like five eighths.

Most of the work this week centered around two things: the halves presentations and polishing up a playable demo to show at halves.  We’ve had a working prototype for a month, but it is very rough and not easily understood just by watching.  Since Xin is responsible for the main workspace in the app, most of the work centers on him.

For example, Allison has been working with Xin to integrate new art assets.  Elodie and Glen have been making sure that the connection to the server is as seamless as we can make it.  Jeremy got back to work on the camera system, though we knew it wouldn’t make it into the app in time for halves.  Chris worked with one eye on the future, finalizing the design doc and final schedule; he also began bug hunting in the data entry system.  Of course, this started out as “using” the data entry system to populate the database and quickly became “bug hunting”.  Hopefully we can have the database completely populated by next week.

We also rehearsed our halves presentation.  On Tuesday we went to Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and showed the presentation to Lisa Brahms and Rebecca Grabman.   Their feedback was invaluable in tightening everything up.  Lisa gave voice to an idea that we all understood intuitively but perhaps unconsciously.  Our target demographic is not all kids ages 2-13; it is instead the family unit that includes kids ages 2-13.  This simple restatement of our design concept clears up a number of issues we were having, including whether or not we could expect parents to help children over rough patches.

We gave our presentation to the faculty Friday and received generally good reviews.  Most are impressed with our scope and schedule (we plan to leave ourselves close to a month to polish).  Concerns included that the faculty did not completely understand Makeshop’s user story before or after our app; at softs we will be sure to provide both cases to the faculty so they can better grasp the context of our app.