This Spring, the NSF Smart Tools project team hired two students, Eric Gan and Ricky Chen, to work on building concepts for a functional pitch booth. Ricky Chen was tasked with developing a Pitch Booth concept into a fully realized physical prototype to be tested with teachers and students at Quaker Valley High School, and evaluated against a set of success criteria. In tandem, Eric Gan was tasked with designing and implementing a raspberry pi based video reflection system for use in the pitch booth that would be deployed at Quaker Valley.
Installation of the pitch booth at Quaker Valley High School was scheduled for mid-March 2020. Through weekly iterative design with the research team, Eric and Ricky had each developed working parts of their respective pieces of the booth. Ricky’s pitch booth concepts evolved from sketches and models to a full-sized physical prototype built from foam core and adhesive. Up to this point, Eric had developed a walk-through version of the video recording interaction, including a landing screen, 3-digit participant sign in, and a management system for uploading completed videos to a secure server. When the stay at home order was announced due to Covid-19, the pitch booth installation at Quaker Valley High School was cancelled and the team had to pivot to create remote solutions. In partnership with Amy Keller and Linda Conlon from Quaker Valley, Ricky created design mockups for the outside of the booth that included Carnegie Mellon University’s logo, the NSF logo, and written information on the research study. Eric’s pivot included adding functionality to support pitch booth prompts, the ability to tag pitch videos with microcredentials, and recording time sequences. At the end of the semester, Amy and Linda reviewed student work via zoom. Ricky and Eric documented each part of their work and presented an example interaction of how a student would use the pitch booth from start to finish.
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Ideation Elizabeth: Physicalizing documentation triggers I was initially focused on developing a documentation camera after Zach noted that it would be easy to develop from scratch. However, after consulting with Marti and Daragh, I realized more and more that I was falling into a rut. There were a few novel features, including automatic photo uploads to the student gallery and easy, student-based photo categorization. However, the resulting benefits seemed peripheral at best, as our initial interviews revealed that students had less trouble with documentation, but more trouble with learning about physical computing in the first place. As a result, I revisited the core student needs from the early storyboards: how might we improve student learning in physical computing? From this, I came to one key realization that I previously failed to consider: a singular documentation practice is unsuitable for all processes in a physical computing project. For instance, while the beginning of a project might require more pen and paper for ideation sketching, the middle might require a more digital notation, as students typically work directly on the Arduino editor. As such, a documentation camera is not the most flexible solution given the changing nature of a physical computing environment. by Patricia Yu Overview I helped to develop ideas for and prototype a set of documentation tools to better integrate technology, space, and education. These tools will connect students with their creative processes to strengthen and deepen learning. This was part of a research project to help us develop a hypotheses for how documentation as a mediating process productively supports learning. These tools were created for the teaching program, Startable in Pittsburgh. Smart Tools: Bringing concepts together The Hub Projector The Hub Projector allows the tools that are being used personally to be integrated into a public space. The Hub Projector is able to connect to all of the other devices and project each individual device's functions onto a screen for everyone to observe. The form of the projector takes a complementary shape as the camera tools in this series. The back of the projector is smaller to the front face in order to establish the tilt of the body to be able to project an image onto a wall. This is valuable to students where documentation does not only become a process that is solely for themselves, but also something that can be publicized and shared with others. The projector acts as a platform that allows students to use these tools as part of their documentation, in presentations, and as a way of language to communicate their ideas to others. Final Product Reflections and Future Steps
Overall, I really enjoyed this research experience, especially discussing these tools and ideas with other students and experts. Next semester I hope to follow on these 3 major areas: 1) I would like to further expand on interaction amongst all the the tools and how they can connect to the Hub Projector. For example, how exactly should a user navigate the digital interface when transferring data amongst the tools, and how do the different functionalities the tools when "collaborating" with each other emerge. To do this, I will be creating mockups for the UI/UX of these tools on an app. 2) I want to also experiment how I could completely eliminate the presence of personal phones in the context of these tools to allow a complete immersion of a "work space". This was a concept discussed with the teachers at Startable and the idea of creating almost a new "language" with just these documentation tools was agreed to be a very interesting and unique path for this project. There may also be an external device that students can wear that replaces the function of the phone, so when students enter a physical computing room, they place their phones in a stowaway area and replace them with a tool that will allow them to focus on their work. This could make the physical computing room seem like walking into a complete different space from the rest of the campus space and give students a new experience. 3) With working prototypes, I would want to do more user testing research to help me determine what other tools students may want and need in their making processes. Talking with experts of the physical computing lab would also help gather insightful information that would make these tools more valuable to student usage. by Ricky Chen I https://medium.com/@rckychen In the previous Smart Maker post, I documented my process of constructing the form of the booth while noting specific components like materiality, structure, and assembly. In this post, I will document the progress I have made on the video prompt interface, the visual components of the booth, and the video viewer interface for both the students’ side as well as for the teachers. Video Prompt Interface:My role in the video prompt interface was to refine and clean up the existing UI and prompts that the teachers and Eric Gan have settled on. After listening to the recorded QV 2/19/20 meeting, these were some of the key components on the video prompt interface that I noticed kept reoccurring in the meeting:
From this, I settled on SDL Studio to be the name of this space, which I feel is much more interesting than a booth or project. As for some of the wording, I refined everything to leave out the idea of this being a project so that it is more of an SDL experience for the students. In the interface, some visual elements that I refined were the typography, spacing, and background color. (insert photo) For the background, I decided to use a dark gray instead of a complete black to give a softer experience for the viewers’ eyes. A light yellow color is also used as the selection and highlight colors, which is based on the Quaker Valley gold color. However, the color on the screen is not the exact shade as the QV gold, so it might change in the future. The instructions at the bottom were also tightened up with it always being held by two brackets with the main verbs being in all caps for emphasis. By following this system, I was able to make the entire booth much more professional and cohesive through the uniformed style on each screen. One of the concerns of the teachers was on the screens that would show that that they were recording, and how we could make it less time-based to allow the students to focus more on their ideas rather than the time left. We thought of some ideas like a recording camera indicator to show that recording was in progress as well as a countdown timer to help give time, but in the end, we felt these were too intrusive for the experience that we want the students to have. After exploring a little more, we settled on a growing progress bar, which indicates that recording is happening as well as gives a softer approach to the time they have left compared to a countdown timer. (insert photo) The micro-credentials screen was one that had a lot of refinements. Originally, it would only show one micro-credential at a time, and the student would have to constantly scroll to go through each of them. I felt this was an issue as the students would not be able to see all their possible options at the same time. For this, I have changed it to where it shows all the possible micro-credentials on one screen, which I think would be helpful for when the students are deciding which one(s) they believe their evidence supports. It also has a done option, which only becomes available after a student has picked at least one option. Overall, the video prompt interface that Eric coded is quite similar to the ideal one that we have mocked up on the Google slides. They all have the necessary information on each screen, but there are some differences in type size, alignment, and content organization. In the future, I’m hoping that the actual program can become as close to the ideal version as possible so that we can have a more cohesive and uniformed interface. From this, we believe it will allow the students to have more professional experiences when using the SDL Studio, which will contribute to the overall learning goals we have for this space that we are creating. Booth Visual System: For the visual system of the booth, there were many different components to incorporate. After listening to the QV meeting audios, here are some components that I noted down:
From looking at some of their requirements, I started looking at some concept boards based on geometric shapes as well as QV colors. Much of foundational learning comes from the understanding of shapes, so I wanted to see how I could incorporate these simple elements to become components that would attract and incentivize the students to use the booth. (insert photo) In the end, this was the booth design that I came up with. It uses many simple geometric shapes as well as some intricate ones to emphasize certain words like fostering and new on the booth. From the final presentation, the teachers were pretty happy with this design, but I feel that there can still be some future iterations to help clean and simplify the design. On the right, it has the visual system with the colors, logos, and typeface that I used. I hope to keep refining this visual system as I continue to make progress in the design. In the end, these elements are also going to be incorporated in the storyboard and instructions I will be creating in the future to allow everything to be as cohesive as possible. During the final presentation, I also received interesting feedback about whether we have done testing to see whether the students would actually be attracted to the booth design that I have created. Initially, our plan was to do some testing and evaluation during the booth implementation phase, but due to the current situation, everything went remote, and I completely forgot about the importance of user testing. I am glad this feedback came up as it is very important to actually get some feedback from my main users. In the future when it becomes more possible, I think it would be a good effort to do some quick surveys and interviews with the students to get some insight into what they currently think about the visual designs I have created for their SDL experience, and how it can be improved to fit more of their interests and needs. Video Viewer Interface: (insert photo) For the video viewer interface, I initially started it off by making it as similar to the video prompt interface as possible. So here, it has the same 3-digit login screen as well as a similar type, color, and layout. For the first two columns, it shows the student’s side, and on columns three to six, it shows the teacher's side. I think overall, the student side was pretty easy to design as there are not as many components and functionality to include. The only important components are to show the different encounters as well as the evidence and micro-credential tags for the videos. The teacher's side was much harder as there are so many possible layers of information to showcase. Here, I decided to separate information based on students, calendar, encounters, and evidence and micro-credentials. After finishing this quite prototype, I realized the different components all shared similar information, and it was quite repetitive to have them all on different screens. Furthermore, from my first iteration, I got some feedback to actually look at some teacher dashboard interfaces to get a better idea of how information can be showcased and organized in a way that teachers are more familiar with. (insert photo) After looking at the feedback that I received, I decided to restart the interface design and just start with quick and simple wireframes without considering any other visual components. This was a really helpful part as it allowed me to better organize what information I needed to show without the distraction of visuals. Here, the student side is pretty much the same as the first iteration except that it has a timeline on the home screen. This component was included as a helpful visual to show the students where they are in their progress as well as to give them an overview of their SDL journey. The students can also click on a specific point of the timeline to access that specific video if they know which one they want to review. On the teacher side, there were many adjustments as it now includes tabs for class overview and video filter. The overview tab is the home page, which gives the teachers a glimpse into their class activity for a specific week. The teachers felt most of the information was useful to them except the average number of minutes for video recordings. Instead, this was substituted with information on how many unique students recorded videos to allow the teachers to have a better idea of whether the videos for the week were made by the same students or not. The roster and filter options were refined from the initial iterations where the roster is organized alphabetically, and the filter options have a cleaner and simple UI for the teachers to select what videos they only want to see. From this, it fixed the initial problem of repetition where the same information was showed on different pages with just a few bits being new content. Reflection:
Overall, I feel that my experience working on this project has been quite valuable as I learned a lot of things I previously was not familiar with. For the booth, I have never really experienced prototyping something this big before, so it was an interesting process to learn how to cut, construct, and assemble something at this size. Another aspect I really enjoyed during the semester was the amount of freedom I had in the direction I wanted this project to go towards. For the next steps, I want to work more on the visuals of the SDL experience as well as develop the other necessary components for implementation like booth instructions and assembly guides. In the end, I am really glad I had this opportunity and am excited to further work on this project and hopefully see it implemented and come alive during the Fall. by Eric Gan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-gan-cmu/ Hello my name is Eric and I’m a first year student in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. This past spring semester, I had the opportunity to work on writing code for the Smart Maker Video Reflection Booth. The reflection booth is a part of a larger NSF Smart Making Spaces project that revolves around how reflection practices support project based-learning. The booth provides students with a space to reflect on their projects and they are able to save these recordings so that they can look back on them in the future. These recordings allow the students to really see how they’ve progressed the course of their projects.
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