Week 10

We’re in week 10!

If you read last week’s post you will know that the team was operating at low morale. Why are we doing this? I am going to waste a semester on this and so much more were flying through our heads. You’ll also remember that we had a playtest set for Tuesday.

We worked for a few days, made some changes and had a list of other things that needed to change. We couldn’t get to them all so we went into the playtest with basically what we had on Saturday, just with some bug fixes and some small feedback alterations.

Tuesday morning we had our playtest. It went very well. A completely rejuvenating event, the team feels much better now. We conducted playtests with six kindergarten kids under ideal conditions. In the playtests each kid recorded several sentences that will help us improve our voice recognition.  They then went through out experience starting with our tutorial video and then reading with the experience. Using the tools provided the kids were able to complete the experience and read the sections they were supposed to read.

We noticed two very important things:

  1. Kids with a higher reading level required less prompting to get them to read
  2. Kids who struggled, upon learning of being able to touch the words to have the word spoken, were able to repeat the word that was spoken.

This meant that even though our experience may be asking them to read words above their current level the application could compensate for this and provide them with what they need in order to be successful within the context of the application.

Moving forward we need to make some changes to what the bear says and when it says it, add UI to help let the players know where they should be looking and when, as well as modifying our framework to allow for dynamic difficulty adjustment.  We are also working towards roughing in the whole Guji Guji book by our next playtest.