Midterm Report
This week, the team presented its progress to the ETC community at Halves Presentations, which serve as the midterm point of the semester. Informal feedback thus far has been positive, though the team awaits official critique from faculty, which will be received once all project teams have presented at the conclusion of the week.
The presentation content served primarily to introduce the project to faculty and other students, while framing the schedule and primary challenges moving forward. The team’s greatest challenge to this point has been an issue with FTPS server and framework compatibility, but that issue was resolved this week. Due to the compatibility issue, work on the programming was delayed, but is now well underway. The site map has been finalized, and a data structures flowchart was compiled this week, so the road map for addressing the back end of the Web site construction is set.
Regarding production, an art asset list is being used to manage the creation of graphics for the site, and a number of assets have been completed.
Playtesting, Marketing, Raising Awareness
An area of work that the team is bringing a more urgent focus to is playtesting. In addition to the CMU Buggy and Boy Scouts of America playtests planned, it has been the team’s goal to produce a redesign of the postable Gear blueprint and track response towards this different design.
Crucial to this endeavor is a strategic marketing approach – the postable Gears must attract and engage potential participants, and the content and placement of Gears must achieve this. To that end, the team is striving to devise a slogan and/or logo for the kindworks product to replace the QR code as the Gear’s focal point. As QR becomes a more mainstream technology, its attracting power will lessen, and the focus should be more on content than technology anyway, so as not to alienate those who lack the ability to scan codes. Hand-in-hand with the content revamping is an outreach initiative – the team is thinking of other ways for Gears to proliferate society, and is currently writing to local newspapers to generate awareness of the project. The team’s project Web site is also being tailored to the kindworks theme to receive visitors via playtesting efforts.
