Welcome to Team Joule! We had a productive first week full of research and getting things started.
Setting up the team:
A big part of the first few weeks of the project is defining roles, which is particularly hard to do when we don’t yet have a concrete project idea. But thankfully, that flexibility allows us to plan around our own interests and goals, which were:
- Dale: get away from construction to more 3D art
- Justin: excited to play with LBE, wants to explore new tech, learn producing
- Ruonan: focus on programming, interested in graphics and learning neater coding practices
- Andrew: excited for science/environmental education, wants to try experience design & producing
We’re in the unique position of being a four-person team with no dedicated designer, and it turns out that our interests are different enough that we were able to come up with a nice division of design responsibilities for now:
- Dale: mechanics/tinkering & environmental design
- Ruonan: lower-level, game balance, etc.
- Justin: interaction design, UI/UX, Mechanics
- Andrew: experience design, story/writing; basically high-level stuff
Defining the goals of the project:
The facts about our project that we knew coming into the first week were that it would be some sort of location-based educational experience about alternative energy, and that’s about it. With that alone, our project was much more well-defined than some other ETC projects, but the difference is that we need to deliver an engaging, durable, and complete experience by the end of the semester, so constraints are vital.
To hone in further, we met with Dr. Todd Keruskin, Assistant Superintendent of Elizabeth Forward School District, on Tuesday to discuss his vision.
Here’s what we learned:
- Original plan for Energy Lab: dome is in middle, hub & spokes (Disneyland) model of experiences radiate out from there
- Goal: tying it all together; this is the capstone/culmination
- Maybe could use VR
- Every student has an iPad
- Have been experimenting with Google cardboard
- Don’t have to build something, but can
- Maybe geothermal as a topic?
- Or perhaps conservation—teachers very excited about this, need to align with Chevron’s goals
- Audience: 7th grade
To help process those ideas, we all brainstormed a few ideas for the next day. That exercise helped us realize something about our problem: to us, a culmination of the other experiences meant showing the usage side of energy. Furthermore, any talk of conservation would primarily focus on reducing energy usage.
We used those ideas to see if we were on the right track when we met with Dr. K and the two teachers of the practical science class that our project will be a part of, Mike Baer and Paul Callaghan on Friday. Turns out that we were generally on the same page, and we actually learned that a big goal of their class is to encourage good conservation habit in students. We learned about a lot of the teachers’ inspirations in gaming, which we will research in the coming week, as well as their personal inspirations for teaching about conservation.
They had some great insights into what might be impactful, including the visual of seeing a pile of coal used to power something and competition between students. We also noticed, from looking at the existing installations, that cooperation also made the game more fun and engaging.
We’ve got lots to think about as we move into week two, and we’re off to a great start!