1. Please write up a brief analysis (a paragraph or two) of your observations of the children’s experience. You may wish to consider the following prompt questions:
    1. In what ways did the children find a moment of discovery in your project?
      1. The main discovery point we observed was the moment when children realized that the various pieces could be rearranged to form a different sequence. When the children first came to our station, we had the individual pieces arranged in one permutation to demonstrate one possible arrangement of our game. Upon coming to our station, the children’s immediate fascination was with how the marble traveled within each individual piece. Upon discovering that the pieces could be rearranged while still allowing the marble to traverse, the children become more interested in the game.
    2. What aspects of the observed interactions were surprising to you?
      1. One aspect that was surprising has to do with the differences in interaction of the different age groups. Although we have previously discussed how each age group has different wants and needs due to their current phase in their development, seeing the different age groups interact with our game really made these differences visible. The older children seemed to be more willing to rearrange the pieces themselves and took action to do so. Whereas the younger children were a little more conservative and stuck to observing the differences between individual piece rather than the system as a whole.
    3. How does this visit change your vision of the fully realized project?
      1. This visit helped us reaffirm that our concept was something that children enjoy. In addition we realized that we have to broaden the scope of the game in order for it to be enjoyable by multiple children at once and for a long period of time. Essentially this means we need to have more individual pieces and vary the layering blocks in order to allow for more permutations. We also realized that children find ways to play with something that may differ from the way the piece is intended to be played with. Given this realization we need to make our pieces more mechanical interactive rather than focus on having more automatic elements.
  1. Please comment briefly (a sentence or two) on specific technical performance of your prototype. You may wish to consider the following prompt questions:

The only part that failed was the spinning wheel piece because I dropped it on the way to the children’s school. None of the other parts failed, somewhat surprisingly. Occasionally the ferris wheel motor would stall if a child jammed their hand or a different piece in it.

  1. Please write up a short statement (a paragraph or so) of what you plan to accomplish for the second iteration of the prototype. Please note that it isn’t sufficient just to finish what you started; I’m looking for insight into features and improvements in light of what you’ve learned from testing. You may wish to consider the following prompt questions:

We need to design a lot more simple pieces, more medium level pieces, and at least a second complex piece that the children can use because they really enjoyed the moving parts. We realized that due to the varying heights/speeds of the medium/complex pieces the simple pieces couldn’t be lined up perfectly even with the height blocks. Given this we will make height blocks of varying heights and also will try to standardize the exit height of the marble for medium/complex pieces in order to make sure the pieces can be aligned. 

As the spinning gear didn’t quite work, the children had to use their hands to spin the gear manually and we learned that they really enjoyed the aspect of touching the pieces. With this in mind, we can design more pieces that require interaction from the kids because that will keep them more engaged. We will add more mechanically moving pieces and stick to just a few automated pieces as children can quickly get bored of those if they don’t have anything else to do.

We can also play around with the idea of removing plugs for the moving pieces and using battery packs instead so that all the pieces can be moved around on the floor. We will also focus on creating covers for our automatic pieces to hide the wires and circuits to ensure nothing gets ruined.