Nueva observations today !!!

We decided to test 4 programs at Nueva today

1) The puppet with 1 movable limb and also face capture. The program starts out by having the kids take a picture of their face. Then a new puppet appears on the screen with their face.

2) The tile game. Flip the tiles to play the music

3) Physics game 1: Click on the screen to make silver particles appear on screen. Then the particles move freely around the screen. By pressing two IR-Pens a black hole is created sucking the particles in.

4) Physics game 2: Click on the screen to create nodes. The nodes are connected together with edges. The more you click the more edges/nodes appear, starting to look like a spider web. You can click on the nodes to drag the "web" around the screen.

Games we are not testing:

1) Game with objective: Find the girl by dragging the gremlin around the screen

2) Motion tween game: Point and click instead of dragging the puppet around. Click on the body then click somewhere else to move the puppet. The puppet animates while he moves to the position you clicked. We used the tween processing library to do this.

Questions to ask the kids at Nueva today


Spinning Tiles
(1) BEFORE LETTING THEM PLAY WITH THE DEMO, describe a wall of tiles that flip when you brush by them, and ask them to visualize the experience. Then let them play with the app, and ask how well the actual app reflected what they expected.
(2) Given that sounds will play with each spinning tile, was music a compelling form of feedback? Would sounds like clicks and whirs have been better?
(3) Do they wish there were more tiles?
(4) Would they prefer less tiles (i.e. like only a dozen), if each tile had a design on the back instead?
(5) More of an observation question: were the users interested in figuring out the correlation between volume/pitch and tile spin control? If the goal was to have this entertain curiosity for around 30 seconds, did it succeed?


Puppets And Stories
(1) Could the children point to a feature of the puppets that was more engaging than a normal physical doll? Does a background, or having a face on a head, connect emotionally with them?
(2) Did control of the puppet (and arms) encourage ideas for narrative or play?
(3) Taken from the two previous questions, would the users be interested in using the puppets of "them" for further activities? For example, if a magical printer could "print" out an actual doll with their face on the head, would that be interesting?

Spinning Tiles
1) What do you think should happen when you click on a tile?
2) Were the changing colors interesting? How should they respond to the tiles you're spinning?
3) Did the music make the game more fun? Did you like creating music or should we choose the music for you?
4) Did you focus more on creating shapes and patterns with the tiles or on creating interesting sounds? Why?

Physics Game 1 & 2
1) Did the games make sense?
2) How else would you want to interact with the balls and lines?
3) Can you think of ways to incorporate color, sound, animation?
4) Can you think of better ways to create black holes?
5) What should the black holes do when they capture a particle/planet?