EMAs PROJECTS

Check out my Instagram, where i post more often my coding art

This has been a challenging semester, both of the course we had about, coding, wiring, interaction design and also corona pandemics. But I can tell that I have never had that steep learning curve, by that I mean, when I look back a couldn't anything of electronics and coding, and in one week I learn css and html, the other making my own game controller. WELL what can I say, that that I'm really impressed by this course and our course leader. 

But we didn't just code and wire, we also, had a semester filled with intrestning guest lectures that inspired me and books that has been on a list to read. I got my eyes more open by books like Shaping things by Bruce Sterling, and I'm still on the last a Philosphy of design by Willem Flusser... I get really inspired by reading and I like to learn to critical views by other people. 

We also started have been improving our blogging skills of design process. I have look back to all my posts, and I see that it has curve where I show that I got better at blogging. This idea of constant blogg writing wasn't my kind of thing. But while doing it and especially on the last project I saw the need of it. The possbility of looking back and seeing where are you going, this what I learned. And even so it wasnt the best at the start the blogging developed to be better at the end. It still has potential to get better, my blogging skills, but it step by step. 

I hope you have enjoyed looking at my projects and how it has been developing. Maybe I come back for next semesters. 

P.s. i also have been working a lot on my English hehe 

And I had  a little bit fun with creating a “commercial” ish video to show you the features and how the final prototype works. 

Our 5 weeks project reached final day . We have just had a presentation of our interactive tool project for teachers and other students. I am really happy by presenting my project. We have worked so much, and we presented a really good case study and analyses and research we have done. It has been a really good collaboration with to my partners. In this project were involved a lot of amazing people, who helped us develop an amazing result. 

Feedback and my reflections

The feedback we got was actually exactly what we hoped to hear. Our product “interactive tool” for students was a great research but even so we had 5 weeks I wish we could have work a little bit more. Im satisfied with our prototype, the response was that its a good base and has potential to be developed. We also got the critic that we should have decided what concept to go for earlier in process. We worked on 3 different ideas because our research lead us there. We could maybe stopped at one moment but we wouldn't have explored as much as we did now.

Some tools we have used trough working on this project is milanote, where we have collected all research and analyses, thumbnails of ideas, moodboards, internees and feedbacks trough the prosess. Have a look if it intrigues you:

https://app.milanote.com/1KC75y152kSn4H?p=QCgxGS3tT1M

This just the Start side. hihi...

The project I been working for last 5 weeks has been developed in Figma. and guess what I kinda start to like it, even so there is some feature that it should add in soon future. hihi! but here is my bobbly start interface. I like the easy approach to make fun visual aesthetics. 

Yesterday we had usability test for last time, to for sure know that what we think, will other not knowing the concept understand it. I got to do so fixs ups on Figma.

Here are some stuff I worked on today so the prototype would look “perfekt”:

I added blinking lights to stuff user supposed to click on, so communicates crearly it beginning of use phase

Instead of active pressing character Q all the time, will now information appear automatically in start version

Clear information about what you should do

Possibility to exit the task, in case you just want to explore the picture

These are some stuff I worked on yesterday and today... can't believe that this software has developed so much from where we started. 

Before

After

Final dilemmas, what to do?

So after fridays interview with director at Aschehoug, she told us how we could improve and strength our project. We got some tips in connecting different chemical reactions and show how their affects each other. One case we had was a fire place. Director was really engaged. She liked it, but she wanted to see more of how things work together, bigger picture. We left with a question mark... is this what we need to strength our project???????????

This is a short video of new prototype. It has still some undone stuff that we are going to fix. 

On Thursday we had an interview with editor at Aschehoug. She was great help to see missing points in our prototype. She putted us on right direction what we should take a bette look at and develop until the final presentation. One of most important things she said was: “The biggest learn outcome you get when you see symbiosis in this case between photosynthesis and combustion. Where are all the stuffs coming from and where their are heading to?”

So its 4th week we are working on our project. We have tried 3 different concept and focus areas. It has developed from physical product to digital. 

The focus we have had this week in our project was to develop a mix of our last to ideas. We paid more attention to make student who will use our “app” to be more active. Its the iteration we been working a lot on, because the last presentation we got feedback that activity we have created for students was to passiv and needed better explanation. 

The new idea will focus more on daily chemical reactions and phase changes. We hope that this will open possibility for students to understand while seeing it in context. 

a taste of our newly made figma and browsing trough interface... 

Week 3

This week goal was to explore how our concept would look fully screen based. With this I mean that we take away our idea with bricks (the physical part) and transfer everything on screen. 

In start of the week we also had an intervjue with a girl 10 years old. We showed her our idea and listened how she was responding and reacting. It was a really fun intervjue couse she adored our physical touch to iPad based software. Well even so she liked it we needed and wanted to try out the concept on doing everything on screen and see cons and pros with.

Here you see new interface with improvence and interation from last one. We added short intro in how it works, sending afterwards directly to explore phase of stuff. We also added character that will help students to understand better and get more curious about it. 

Illustration made by Charlotte Gereke

Figma collaboration Mathilde Nissen & Me

After the test we got some feedback on what we should work more

Week 2

On Tuesday we shared our ideas of concepts and made decision along one of them that sounded promising. 

Concept: Interactive board (concept drawing by @designbynissen​)

Moodboard for Figma

What? A board where you will place your iPad and use bricks that will be read by placing them on the board and appear on iPad screen. Different bricks will represent different elements. You also have some sliders that decide “temperature” and “pressure”. 

How? A student will have to solve different tasks. It will happened by learning what different stuff around us consist of. Like for example “water”. As student will hava an introduskjon, tasks and at the end one experiment that they have to make. 

Why? Our goal is to make difficult science stuff and themes like periodic system more approachable and easier to understand, by scaling it down to small pieces that are easy to chew for 5-7 grade students.  By making it more approachable and fun, we hope to encourage and motivate them to learn about it. ( Maybe it will open opportunities for student to choose it later in school system as a subject to study like in high school)

Interface of our concept idea

Interview: 

Project in progress. On Friday last week we presented what we have decided to work with: 

User group: primary school students (10-12 years)

Subject: Science ( spesific chemestry themes) 

Theme from curriculum: Explore phase transitions and chemical reactions and describe what characterizes them

Why Science subject?

 We were exploring to different subjects that is at school. At first we thought about math, crafts, sports. All of these subjects sounds fun! How to decide. We were looking for something that would challenge us. Somehow we came to the subject science. And started analyzing it. I read Master's thesis in science didactics. It was about “Why should I learn sciene?”. Hege Aardal writes about how kids understand science subject, what they think its, what should they learn. I got some questions after reading it. Most of kids described science as learning of human body, plants and animals. I was thinking where did physic and chemistry went? Do they know the that it is part of it? 

We felt that chemistry and physic been left behind. Although it is the most exciting theme in book (in my opinion). The chemical reactions and different experiments! We thought that because these stuff  isnt actually properly presented only after you start at high school. We think it will motivate kids if we could manage to make some easier approach to it. 

Why 5-7 grade students?

We looked up books and curriculum and found out that. The start of science subject starts at 2 grade. Til 8 grade they carefully touches themes with physic and chemistry. We want kids to be more aware of the possibilities they have!!!

Its timo to introduce new project we are going to work for the coming 5 weeks. We will be dived into groups of three. This time we are going to work with digital learning tools.

Our coorparotion will be with publishers Aschehoug. They are working in developing all kind og interactive learningstool, publishing school books and so on.

I glad we will work with school theme, couse I feel like it’s a lot to catch up there digitally. It is also a really interesting theme, especially in our world where everything is transferring to digital world.

Our goals for first week are to choose user group we want to work with, choose the subject and problem statement we are wanting to solve.