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This is the final, submitted version of our group report for Experience Design 2.

ED2GroupReport.pdf Download this file

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Following Heidi's post, you will find below my personal ADR:

Experience_Design_2_-_Flash.doc Download this file

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In addition to submitting one group report, each person submitted a report on a topic we chose to research more fully.  Earlier in this process three members of this group visited the London Science Museum to actively aid in our brainstorming.  I chose to visit the museum again and report the experience.  The surfaces we encountered at the museum narrowed our focus to creating a projected surface display for our completed group project.

HeidiBlanton-ADR.pdf Download this file

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I've created some personas based on our research amongst teachers. It helps to summarise what we know about our audience (obviously kids are the target users, but teachers need to buy into it and are the primary decision makers on whether it gets used). Let me know what you think!

Personas.ppt Download this file

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After several bank holidays and sunny days, our group is coming back together to work through the final stages on our term project.  We were granted an extension of a few extra weeks and we spent yesterday discussing our project plan and firming up some deadline dates.  In the coming weeks we still have a lot of work to do, but we have a plan and a clear path forward in hand.  We've done a lot of work individually, and impressively each member of the group has lived up to their strongest role. Our challenge for the next few weeks will be to start putting the pieces together to develop an amazing prototype!

The following presentation is an outline of what we've done so far.

Sesame_Culture_Buddy.ppt Download this file

The Wiimote with LED pen was tested before the holiday, and it works with the projectors in the JG Building.  A logistical step for us would be to find a room to host our prototype and make sure that room is booked on the day we present.  Once we set up the location and the date, invitations to faculty, and whoever else we want to be there, will be sent out to view our presentation.

The report will be compiled and written by Jessica and myself, with the draft circulating in the final weeks leading up to the deadline.

And finally, the deadlines the group needs to concern itself with:

• Presentation of Final Prototype - 2nd June:  This is the day likely to present our final prototype.  Tentative to booking a room in the JG Building, of course.  This should be finalised in the next week so invitations can go out for the presentation soon.
• Final Groupwork Submission - 13th June:  And then we can relax :)

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via techcrunch.com

Reminded me of the group's previous Inamo experience. I actually think I would like this better than the table! It may be less immersive, but it's also has similar benefits to the table ordering system, without as many as the distractions.

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On the plus side, we could probably do a lot with the new API tools that they do have!

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http://www.gemin-i.org/about-us/

http://www.gemin-i.org/what-we-do/

They have a system called Rafi-ki. Rafi.ki is a secure online learning community that lets your pupils talk to schools all over the world.

http://www.rafi.ki/site/

I think we can give what we are creaeting to them and more importantly see if we can help real children out. I will contact them...

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<p>View Egypt and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.</p>

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via readwriteweb.com

I found this very interesting, and since our project is related to instructional technology, I thought I would share. The chart above is interesting, teachers and students are not seeing eye to eye on what information and media literacy skills are important. The most interesting statistic to me was "Ability to produce digital media reports", only 29% of teachers find this to be an important skill! Maybe I'm shocked by this because I feel most of what I do is produce digital media reports. Same for "know how to analyze and interpret media stories". The teachers scores varied enough to make me think they feel strongly against digital media in education (my interpretation).

Also, click through to the article, there's a chart on "Personal Access to Mobile Devices" divided by grade (US students). I was shocked by the figures for grades K-2 (in this US Kindergarten starts at 5 years old, so we're talking students that are 5-7 years old). Of this age group 21% have a cell phone without internet access, and 16% have a smart phone! As you can imagine, these figures increase as the student get older.

What I'm getting from this is students and parents both want to use technology in the classroom, especially their own devices, but teachers and administrators may be standing in their way. This is probably no surprise, but if we were to ever draw up personas of teacher, student, and parents, these figures might be helpful insight to potential needs or barriers.

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I think we need to think carefully about the navigation. Continent > Country > City

Continent list >

                  Country list >

                                   City list >

Then a circular nav through cultural types:

Food - Music - Climate - Images - Animals

Clicking on any of these takes you through a media gallery. Agreed?

Alex are you ok creating this flash from globe to this level?

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I did some more internet searching today and discovered that Photoshop can render 2D images into 3D automatically!  I sort of tried this out with my version of Photoshop, unfortunately, I do not have the correct videocard for the 3D features to work properly, so it renders it "in software only".  I hope the versions of Photoshop in the lab do a better time at this, but in short, here is how you do it.

1.  Find your image (I used this one to test)

2.  Adjust the height of the image so that it is about 1/2 that of the width (in my example I just increased the canvas size, I realise it's probably not exactly correct proportions).

3.  From the 3D menu choose New Shape From Layer -> Sphere (this is what it created)

4.  And that's it...

I can't scroll around the image... probably having to do with the video card issue.  But I have to imagine there's a way to combine this 3D effect in Photoshop with Flash pretty easily... I hope?!

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I'm going to work on trying to figure out how to get a "realistic globe" look by wrapping around a static image.  Alex pointed out to me yesterday that some of the online globes are still a flat jpg that kind of float over a round image.  He also showed me some that while NASA has an appropriately cut image for use, we agreed it might be difficult to manipulate it for our own needs (basically simplify it for children from the satellite image).  I think it would be easier for us to find a nice and simple world map image, or one without the satellite imagery and the continents already differentiated, and adapt it to the globe, than it would be to map the continents on a globe rendered sattellite image.  This will be easier for the children to use, but it will also be easier for us when it comes to mapping out the interaction.

I haven't explored the following Photoshop plugins yet, but it's possible one of these might be able to do this easily:

Flexify - this one is not free, but it does have a free trial.  There's a Lego Globe created in the examples, but not a real one.  Some of the message boards point to this one for accomplishing the globe task with maps.

Hugin - this plugin is free and it might do some things Flexify does, but not other things.  I might start playing with this one first since there's no cost.

Then Googling around after class yesterday I discovered this Photojojo post on creating planets using panoramas.  If the plugins don't work, this might also work for getting the same effect.

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I'm so pleased to say I'm not mad, as I have found the incredibly cool Flickr API tool that I was trying to describe to Eewei and Heidi last night. It's Tag Galaxy. You simply search for a tag, then in presents related tags in a galaxy. Check out how the photos fly in and you can spin the globe when they are all loaded. I think it's particularly interesting when searching for a city as you get an overview of all the photos tagged there.

This is someone's thesis project and it was built using a Flickr API and Papervision 3D which is described as a Open Source realtime 3D engine for Flash. Alex, is it worth investigating whether we could use it?

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I uploaded the last two meetings to Livescribe.  It's audio only for both of them, I didn't take many notes.

15.03.2011 Meeting

24.03.2011 Meeting

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• I teach year one and the school is located in a large village on the outskirts of a council estate.
• We teach children about life in other countries by comparing and contrasting them to our own country in Geography lessons and also through literacy e.g. a book called Handa's suprise is based in Kenya. We explored where Kenya was, what the weather is like there, how people's lifestyles are different and tasted exotic fruits from other countries. We have links with a school in Africa called Highfields and a person who runs the school comes to take assemblies and tell us about life over there.
• We don't have to teach a set number of lessons about cultural diversity but we do celebrate differences mainly through assemblies, PSHE and circle time.
• The challenges we face are that there are very few ethnic minorities in our school.
• We use big books, interactive whiteboards, interactive stories, artefacts from different cultures, people coming in to talk to us, music and dance.
• cbeebies stories are very culturally diverse, interactive big books.
• I really like the idea of the programme for schools - the children would really enjoy finding out about different cultures.
• What would affect whether we used it in schools? The cost of the product, how many different cultures it explored, whether it had different levels of difficulty for the different age ranges, if it had teaching notes with it with worksheets or activities based around the programme, interactive quizzes, printouts available.
• Maybe linking it with texts and themes taught at the different age ranges in the national curriculum, e.g. Handa's surprise reception/ks1, egyptians KS2.

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