CS247i Final Reflection
Intro
I still remember how in class 2A, we had to write down on a sticky note any topic in electoral politics that we were interested in further exploring. I felt lost because I personally don’t know much about politics and it’s such a big topic to try to tackle. Other students were already starting to place their sticky notes on whiteboards around the classroom, so I rushed my response. I wrote something very specific that mentioned exploring the voting experience of immigrants who recently became citizens since this was something that related to my personal life because my mom is currently in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. As I walked around and read the topics that others were interested in, nothing really caught my attention because I did not feel any sort of connection to the topics. How was I supposed to invest time and effort on projects that were supposed to help people understand a specific topic if I didn’t care about that topic? All my other classmates were forming their groups, and then it was just Sanura and I left. We both didn’t know a lot about politics, but were interested in learning about the voting journey of a marginalized citizen. We became the Voter Suppression on Marginalized Communities group, and I couldn’t have been more excited!
Project 1
This class introduced me to the concept of mind maps. For my secondary research of Project 1, I read a very long and detailed academic article about voter suppression tactics on marginalized groups. With my mind map, I was able to spread out all the information and use colors and shapes to emphasize certain details and I could easily make connections between them. Creating a mind map of my interview with my auntie helped me organize key highlights in her experience of being a Mexican born U.S. citizen who has voted in U.S. presidential elections. There was a turning point after gaining more knowledge through our research where we both felt more attachment and passion towards our topic. We were both eager to work on our explorable explainer because we were creating real-life scenarios to present to the user where they had to make decisions that will help them better understand the lives of marginalized voters in everyday situations. Our goal with our explorable explainer was to evoke emotions with the storylines so that users can empathize with the struggles marginalized groups face when they want to vote.
Project 2
I really enjoyed the new concepts I learned for Project 2. Information architecture is foundational for website design and I’m grateful I was able to practice this concept since I will be working as a front-end software engineer after graduation. I struggle with my “artistic eye” but had a lot of fun creating a style tile and making many changes to our design layout when actually building the reference site. At the beginning of this project, I did not really see a purpose on it because I just thought it would be a website where users can find our explorable explainer and find our research behind it. However, after conducting our cardsort, I realized how important the layout of our information was to help users explore our topic more. We were very proud of our reference site and really wished we could have incorporated a page dedicated to support marginalized individuals.
Project 3
I was the most challenged with Project 3. I had never created a game from scratch before and could not imagine how we were supposed to create a game about a serious topic. I think that one of the reasons why I struggled so much with this project at first was that I was stuck in this mindset that our learning outcome for players was for them to learn about the experiences of marginalized voters and empathize with them. However, that created games that were too similar to our explorable explainer and weren’t really an actual game. A big turning point for this project was thinking of game ideas that would teach players about what can be done to help marginalized voter groups. I enjoyed iterating our game and improving it each time. I conducted the final playtest with my friends and I was shocked by how much fun they had playing it while learning about different policies that affected different kinds of marginalized voters. I felt confident and proud with our final product. We came a long way!
Thank You
There were many times where I had to step out of my comfort zone in this class, but I’m glad I did because it helped me become more invested in each project and be satisfied with the work I completed. Without the feedback of classmates for each project, our final products would have not been the same. I appreciate all of Christina’s and Ben’s help in this journey of using technology and games to simplify the complexity of helping others understand a specific topic.
