Week 7 – Before 1/2

Since next week is our ½ presentation, we spent some time working on the slides and rehearsal. The presentation will be 15 minutes long followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. Normally, we would have delivered our presentation formally. Now, we’ll deliver the presentation through Zoom. It might be less stressful but we still need to professional. We’ll have one person controlling the slides and everyone will say “Next slide please” to turn the slides. The ETC staff will spotlight the team so the audience can watch and hear the presentation better.

Our presentation is divided into 4 parts – introduction, progress before ¼, progress after ¼, and future plans. Everyone got a part of the slides and work on the speech. We started off writing the script individually and then had a discussion about it, which is a way to make us be more familiar with others’ parts and improve everyone’s part. After reviewing our initial draft, Carl and Scott suggested that the fewer words in a slide the better because people will pay more attention to what we say. The goal here is really to replace all the words in the slides with visuals. The good news is that we tested a series of spot environmental interactions on Wednesday and we will definitely include those videos in our presentation. Also, we agreed that it was important to show what we learned from the playtest playtests, including those negative feedback.

We did several rehearsals several times before we practiced with our instructors. In our initial practice, we took more than 17 minutes. However, the more we practiced the more we felt confident. Our flow was also much better. On Friday, we managed to present in 15 minutes, but the slides need to be less wordy still. The instructors indicated that only 3 keywords should be on each slide. We need to work on the slides before Monday when we’ll have another practice with our instructors.

This week, we successfully tested out some environmental changes including 

  • Clapping to turn on the light
  • Opening a trash can by stepping on it
  • Shooting a ball into a basket 
  • Pushing

We also showed interactions with our clients. They seemed to be excited about those interactions and suggested we sequence them in a challenging way. We believe this will be our new focus for the following weeks. We’ll need to come up with a background story to link interactions together and it would be great if we could have some visuals (sketches, flowcharts, etc…) to illustrate our ideas to our client.