It was halves last week. For those of you who are not familiar with the Entertainment Technology Center and the process that student projects there go through it is something like this:
Students are broken into teams of 5 – 6 shortly before the semester starts and placed on projects. Roughly a quarter of the way through the semester teams begin preparing for Quarters. This is a check in where we present what our plan is for the semester and possibly where we are currently to the faculty. The next milestone is called Halves, and as you may have guessed this comes roughly at the halfway point of the project. Halves consists of a 15 minutes presentation followed by Q&A. This is followed about 3 to 4 weeks down the line by Softs. Which is a time where the project should basically be done and the faculty come by to check up and let you know if there is anything extra you should do. Then we have finals where we present the completed project to the faculty.
We just finished Halves, a big milestone to be sure, but also a distressing one. Distressing because time needs to be put into the creation and practice of the presentation. This means most of our time moves away from production and into presenting. As you might imagine this leaves the week after Halves a frenzy of activity as teams struggle to catch up on the work they couldn’t do while making and practicing a presentation. But all of that is behind us now, so lets look at where we are now.
After Halves our next hurdle was the ETC playtest happening that Saturday. We began working on changing feedback and creating a plan for the testing. We knew we wanted to test a new tutorial, our plan was to create a video of someone using the experience and use this in AB testing. In this half of our testers would be shown the video before playing and half would just get the experience without it. We made a video and some changes to the experience in relation to the bear and feedback it gives.
Testing came and did not go so well. We were not expecting the number of kids that entered our room at any given time. We prepared for 3 kids at a time, but ended up having between 4-6, plus their parents at any given time. This made our testing environment pretty horrible. Kids were nervous because of the strange environment they were in and having a decent amount of people watching them try to read. Not to mention having a group of people in a room generates noise which as you can imagine doesn’t play well with an experience using voice recognition as a feature. We saw team morale drop significantly that day. Perhaps the only good thing was that the kids who saw the video tutorial did better at reading to a tablet than those who didn’t see the video.
We moved on to the next playtest we had setup the next Tuesday at a school. Our task moving forward was to fix bugs and move feedback to the right location (TV or Tablet).