Lo-Fi Wireframes and Edits
This week, Natalya Buchwald and I worked primarily on transferring our ideas from storyboarding to hand-sketched wireframes. These pages represent a first look at what we imagine the interface of our program may look like.
We created five different basic screenshots: 1)Teacher View for browsing weekly mysteries, 2)Teacher View for a detailed description of a single mystery, 3)Teacher View for detailed progress page of a single student, 4)Student View for a map that they will interact with to search for “clues” to the mystery, and 5) Student View for when they will interact with virtual characters during the investigation.
A session of editing revealed a lot of things that we want to focus on when creating more hi-fi versions of these screens. We imagine that a teacher using this program will be able to both browse new mysteries each week, and to check up on student progress. We therefore plan to include information about each episode that the teacher can easily reference to judge how appropriate a mystery is for their class, including level, learning goals (including grammar and cultural elements), and a vocabulary list (which will show proportions of previously learned and new vocabulary, based on details of mysteries already completed by the class). However, we are still unsure about how to successfully divide material into “levels” that efficiently and adequately describe about when children are likely to be successful with the learning goals of each episode. Teachers will also be able to see a short summary of the episode, and questions or activities that they can use for an episode-related guided discussion with students.
We also imagine that teachers will be able to check the progress of their students in two different ways: through a class profile and student profile. The class profile will allow the teacher to see mystery progress from the whole class. It will include vocabulary themes and grammatical concepts that the class has had exposure to, along with distributions of completion percent and scores of students on each individual mystery. The student profile, on the other hand, will allow the teacher to see the detailed work of a single child. It will include his or her work averaged over all mysteries, as well as for individual mysteries. Student scores that reflect certain material concepts or themes will also be displayed, so the teacher can see where each student is excelling and where one may need more support.
For the student, on the other hand, the main thing that we looked at was how students will be able to interact with virtual characters to search for clues. We know we want them to practice conversation-relevant skills, but would also like for the program to be able to provide detailed feedback, so completely open-ended responses would be difficult. One potential solution we considered is a fill-in-the-blank format. Students will need to explain the mystery to a suspect or witness and carry on a conversation, but fill-in-the-blanks will allow them to practice key grammar and vocabulary from that particular mystery, while providing an easy way for the program to assess whether an answer is appropriate (and lead the student towards a correct answer if it is not). A virtual peer-like detective may provide this feedback.
Moving Forward
The next step for us is to create hi-fi alternatives to the ideas we sketched out this week. We plan to focus on seven different screenshots of the program: the five listed above, as well as a landing page and a class profile page, both for Teacher View. We will also explore how the pages may look aesthetically to compliment how we want them to function. Some particular questions we want to address are:
- What is the best way to classify mysteries into levels? How many levels should there be? Are levels even neccesary?
- Do you think that a fill-in-the-blank format is a successful way to stimulate conversation for beginner students? Will the type of feedback they recieve be sufficient?
