Author: dwolpow

[caption id="attachment_68" align="alignnone" width="660"] Presentin' (and Ridima being too cool for a black background)[/caption] This week the Prism team had the chance to show off everything we've been working on thus far to the ETC faculty for the "quarters" presentation. While continuing to work on and refine our forest prototype, the team put together a presentation that encapsulated the bulk of our brainstorming, research, design philosophy, our prototype, and our concerns that we still have about the project at approximately 1/4 of the way through the project's progress. In what was akin to a grand round-robin tournament (minus any notion of competition), every project team at the ETC met with all the members of the ETC faculty for 15 minutes at a time, in 5 separate sections. It was an…

[caption id="attachment_62" align="alignnone" width="660"] Prototypin' like a fox[/caption] This week the team took our first definitive steps towards prototyping our allegorical forest game. Working off of what we learned last week, our artists and programmers developed a pleasing, tranquil, temperate deciduous forest biome  for the game's setting. It's important to note upfront that any and all of this content is subject to change—possibly drastically—in the weeks ahead as we develop and test further, and receive feedback from the ETC faculty at the end of next week, the 25% mark in the project's progress. As you can see in the screenshots above, the team has been successful in creating an explorable 3D environment, as well as the basic gameplay mechanic of gathering objects (in this case, berries) in the world. This…

  [caption id="attachment_52" align="alignnone" width="660"] Playtestin'[/caption] This week was a particularly momentous week for the folks here at Prism. We consulted with two outside experts, playtested our early design ideas with children, and made a tentative decision on platform and first prototyping. On Monday, we met with Michelle Lubetsky, M.Ed., BCBA, who is the Training Consultation and Coordinator in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Allegheny Intermediate Unit here in Pittsburgh. The AIU, as part of the Pennsylvania public education system, provides a plethora of specialized educational services to the schools in Allegheny County. Michelle's focus is on working with children with autism and awareness education for neurotypical children; precisely the kind of subject matter expert we needed to speak with! Our conversations with Michelle helped reinforce much of the…

Week 2 is in the books! This week our team continued to put our heads together to come up with some fabulous ideas for our project. The conversations centered around some interesting topics: effectiveness vs. accessibility, the potential of VR as an empathy machine, games vs. experience, and transformational goals. As a public school, Beech Bottom Primary does not have immediate access to the latest and greatest technology showpieces, so we've been thinking long and hard about how to balance our desire to leverage the powerful platforms that are now available to us as developers, while still making something that will be eminently usable by children in public schools. [caption id="attachment_20" align="alignnone" width="660"] Brainstormin'[/caption] The vast majority of technical projects working towards increasing empathy for autistic people has focused on…