Newsletter 2: January 23rd
Newsletter 23rd January 23rd.
This was the second week of the project and where we continued the early phases of
preproduction.
Over the week we spent time furnishing out some the ideas that we had thought over from
last week and began prototyping some of the core mechanics from these ideas to see what
we liked and what didn’t work.
We ended up using what we learnt along with some further ideation to come out with a list of
ideas that we would present to the client.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B61FeDSwwr4uMjR4ZGpoZUZqdGs/view?usp=sharing
The team finally got to go to Mountainview Elementary School, today, to meet our client
Jennifer Smith along with all the teachers and students there.
We presented to the client the list of ideas to find out what mechanics she liked and what her
thoughts were on what could be exposed to the children. The notes from this exciting trip can
be found in the meeting notes below (copy the link into the browser if it doesn’t work it was
giving me some issues earlier):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oc2rTo9FPffciAs2byUBRCrKOfI8EfWkxmaYTbXZfI/ed
it?usp=sharing
We also got to meet the teachers and students. We asked a lot questions about how the app
would be used within the teaching space and what types of mechanics they find preferable
compared to others such as realistic exploration vs cartoon side scrolling.
Jennifer was also able to procure for us some textbooks which we can use to tailor our
content towards. We hope to use these books to figure out gradeappropriate content. It also
serves as a reference to choose what plants and animals we want as the rainforest has far
too many of living things and this can helps limit us to the ones that are important for the
teachers and children.
With this information in hand, next week we will start working on focusing on the content and
also to pick an idea to start developing an initial working prototype for in order to figure out
what works for us and what doesn’t. We will also start updating our website and push to get
these newsletters up there in a neatly formatted style along with a lot of the documentation of
our ideation process so far.
Lastly kudos to our artists on giving our team an amazing initial poster design:
