Project RAISE: Design Simulations Activity

Activity: Population Simulator

In this activity we plan to teach students about different populations and how they interact with different abiotic, biotic, and human factors. Students can also see the effect of the population number with a line graph visualization.

I was tasked with redesigning the existing experience and assisting in facilitating a usability testing session with the old design. I worked with the team on picking the tasks that are best representative of the experience of the activity. Here is a list of the tasks that we had the student do to engage with the simulation activity. They are split by rounds, hence we have the student complete the first round of tasks before going on to the second.

• (round 1)Add Bacterial Disease
• (round 1)Add Bacterial Disease + Medicine
• (round 1)Add Poaching
• (round 1)Add Poaching + Policing
• (round 2)Add Bacterial Disease, and attempt to get the population back to normal
• Bonus: find both ways to get population back to normal.

Some questions we are actively asking the students during and after the testing session include:

• What happened when you added bacteria?
• What happened when you added bacteria and medicine?
• What happened when you added poaching?
• What happened when you…