During this week, we first tool good advantages of the first half to prepare for the playtesting in Wheeling Country Day School. We finished the first version of modeling and development.
Target User:
There are two potential stakeholders of our experience:
Group 1: Students with dyslexia from 2-5th graders
Group 2: Teachers
Pain Points / needs
Students: No immediate feedback; Distracted by other student’s performance; Hard to seek for teacher’s attention; Love the social interaction with teachers
Teacher: Difficult to track each students’ performance; Want students to be able to perform the task individually
We brought the final product to WCDS to test the usability and how the real practice between students with dyslexia. In terms of Elkonin Box, we finished word chaining function, and developed it according to teachers’ demands.
Attached are videos we took in WCDS.
Based on the resources teachers gave us, we firstly brought our word list and tested it with students. Following resource are offered by teachers in Wheeling country day school.
This video is showing how students like the tile design. The generated tiles have the purpose of showing the progress for student who have finished the Elkonin Box exercise. This is the part which is different from the physical Elkonin Box. The design here is to increase the self-achievement students can get. The boy here really likes the sand tile, which means particle system and visual effects are important to students. On the other hand, students didn’t get distracted by tiles but focus on the exercise itself, which is just on the right track.
This video is showing how student was really interacting with the digitization Elkonin Box. We can see the instant feed back helped students a lot.
We also got a lot of suggestions and advices in this playtest.
After we learned about how they would use these two applications, we decided to separate this two applications. Since they would play the game on the Promethean Board in the specific activity room and do the Elkonin Box exercise in library, so we will separate these two into two different application.
In terms of the Promethean Board,
1. Clear UI for teachers inputting words and prepare the class
2. Sound system and default mode for students to play on their own
3. Adding one group for teachers to create would help teachers control the class by themselves
4. Find some methods to balance the difficulty of the exercise, so students will not spend too much time on meaningless stuff
In terms of the Elkonin Box,
1. Since different teacher has different teaching methods, the word family group will be removed
2. Develop reporting system
Though we are not going to show students grade or discouraged results, we will generate the report for teachers as reference.