#teamemoti

This week, Team Emoti spent a lot of time preparing for our rapid prototyping session, as well as doing more needfinding/relationship building with schools. Some quick updates: 

We spoke with Thomas from BACA (Bay Area Children’s Association), who gave up some papers and neat insights about our idea/product (notes from the call are here). Firstly, he told us that one other way we might consider branding Emoti as a screening tool to determine which students might need more help with emotional learning compared to others, based on how many times we have to change the experience. Second, he told us the importance of having kids in multiplayer settings, as learnings that apply in singular settings don’t always apply to group settings. Third, he linked us to a paper that used heart rate control as a way to advance subjects in a game and was super effective. He also offered to have us come in and show his Minecraft lab, where kids play Minecraft to learn social skills. 

We also spoke with two schools: Principled Academy and AltSchool (notes from Principled Academy here, notes from AltSchool here). Principled Academy was very hyped about what we were doing and wanted to learn more. We’re currently in the process of scheduling an on-site with them. AltSchool was also very excited, and shared with us some of the challenges they faced while teaching social emotional learning, which mostly centered around trouble with giving the time and focus to teach emotions when needed, or helping kids with very specific SEL needs. They are very interested in having us work with them, and we’re trying to schedule an on-site with them as well. 

Finally, we also toured the VHIL and learned about the tech used in the lab, and made some useful contacts there. For example, we met Professor Shaun White there, whose wife works at Nueva Schools (one of the schools we were trying to get in touch with), and he was able to get us connected with her. He’s also teaching a class on Augmented Reality, and is also really excited about our project. So, definitely another great contact to have. We’ll post images from our VHIL tour as well! 

On Saturday, we gathered today to run our rapid prototype, but unfortunately one of our sensors didn’t have a required module with it so we had to express order it from Amazon. Now, our timeline is shifted to Sunday-Monday for rapid prototyping due to Valentine’s Day, but we’re confident that we’ll get the data. We managed to writeup our participant walkthrough up, with step-by-step instructions of what we are going to do. You can find that here, along with a list of participants and timeslots here