1. During our time at the school, a handful of children were very excited to understand how the balls were moving from one place to another in “hidden” parts of our design. We were able to pull out the gear and explain how the balls were falling through the spinning top and getting collected at the bottom of the ramp. Additionally, a couple kids were interested in the inflatable and wanted to explore how it was connected. 2 of them took it out of the holder it was placed in and played with it in ways that were unexpected (held it and squeezed it, bounced it, etc). These observations make me much more interested to have this project be a learning opportunity for children who are interested in understanding the mechanics of how the balls move through the system. This might include having acrylic panels so they can see through pieces of the design without us needing to disassemble the system. 
  2. During the visit, I noticed children had a bit of a difficult time getting access to all the parts of the design if there were more than two of them playing at once. Additionally, heavy play resulted in the breaking of a couple pieces immediately in the experience (the catapult, ball collection setup, etc).
  3. The second iteration of our prototype will need to be much more resistant to play. The pieces of our design that began breaking were having issues in ways neither of us had initially accounted for and it made play more difficult for the children. I think the first step would be making the components of our system interlocking so that they can be fixed to one another only when desired. Additionally, we’ll need to spend some time brainstorming how to prevent mechanical components from breaking during play or establishing a plan for back ups in the case of failure. It might be worthwhile to add a level of redundancy so children can play with the same component in parallel so they can explore together rather than one after the other.
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