Trip to Vartan Gregorian - 4.5.00 (First Demo)

What we showed: We showed a semi-working demo version of the workspace. The kids could drag squares of various colors onto a grid. They could also remove squares from the grid. There were all kinds of eye candy such as a firefly that buzzed around. This demo was developed over the past two weeks (since Spring Break).

Observations: At first, the kids had no idea what to do. This further reinforced our earlier intuition that we'd need some sort of tutorial to bring the users up to speed on the software. We were pleased to discover that once the kids knew what the workspace was for (ie for the kids to make their own shapes), they approached it with gusto, forming letters and other random shapes that appealed to them. Overall, they seem to have had a good time.

Overall conclusions: We're on the right track. Since the users seem to have readily familiarized themselves with the software, our fear that it would be too complicated was shown to be unfounded. We do need to think about how to make the buttons more intuitive both as icons and text. We also have come up with ways to make sure that if the kids spend some time in inactivity, the fly will tell them how to act and what to do.

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