Week 42
Our last meeting ended on good notes, as we managed to create a working wireframe-product. We were able to actually see relativistic effects in VR, and got a glimpse of what our software will eventually be able to do. The inter-group reactions were very positive, but would the end users feel the same? In our daily scrum, it became apparent that the next step is interviewing potential users and gauging their reactions.
Towards the end of the course when we have gone through a few iterations and have a solid base of visualisations of interesting phenomena we're planning on demoing the actual product to a volunteer group of high school students and assess whether or not our product supports their learning experience.
In addition to end-user validation we're also utilizing the knowledge of professionals in the fields of computer science and education. At least one PhD thesis from Aalto University supports our hypothesis that building intuition is important in many subjects, though the thesis itself focuses heavily on design. We've also gained some interest within other segments of Aalto University.
We hope to have more conclusive interpretations of the data on next week's blog.
The subject proposer
On Tuesday Kristian, Marci and Rickard met with our subject proposer Kirsi Peltonen for the first time. We explained what we had decided to do for this project, what we have done this far into the project, and showed the video where we show that we have gotten the OpenRelativity to work with a VR headset. She seemed pleased that we have the project under way and have already gotten something to show. She gave us some tips and some contacts that are working with VR.The contacts
We got a list of potential contacts from Kirsi, and we will definitely be contacting some of them. We also thought about contacting the MIT research group behind the OpenRelativity library, which is what our product is based on. We decided on not to contact them just yet, as we feel that the additions that we’ve done so far are not that significant but we will surely contact them in the near future. It would be very interesting to hear if and how they’ve used it in education.Reassessing our agile methods
We felt that seeing each other only once a week was not sufficient, so we added Wednesdays to our weekly working days. We still start each session with a daily scrum, where we assess what needs to be done next. Based on this week, it seems that reducing the length of each individual working session was a good decision. Seeing more often gives us more control on the current state and direction of the project.Presentation
Kristian made the first draft of the presentation on Monday. The content was further refined in our ‘daily’ on Wednesday by the group. Dann helped Kristian to prepare for the presentation on thursday. They practised performing and made final changes to the slides. The presentation was held on Friday and got a very positive reception. The other student groups were interested in the Relativistic VR project and we got some good feedback from them as well. For example one student thought that he would have this technology useful in his own studies.The next steps - validation
Although our validation process is slightly behind course schedule, we've started to gather feedback from high school students on how they study physics, what kinds of topics interest them the most. Through this information we aim to focus our efforts on creating visualisations of the most vital subjects. So far we've been asking high schoolers to fill a questionnaire, and although we still don't have enough data to make any real conclusions, the results so far seem promising. Next week we'll also contact teachers from a few selected high schools in order to distribute our questionnaire to a larger audience. Our initial hypothesis is that high schoolers are interested in modern physics, and especially relativistic theory, but that the current methods of teaching these topics are inadequate and thus many students shun away from then.Towards the end of the course when we have gone through a few iterations and have a solid base of visualisations of interesting phenomena we're planning on demoing the actual product to a volunteer group of high school students and assess whether or not our product supports their learning experience.
In addition to end-user validation we're also utilizing the knowledge of professionals in the fields of computer science and education. At least one PhD thesis from Aalto University supports our hypothesis that building intuition is important in many subjects, though the thesis itself focuses heavily on design. We've also gained some interest within other segments of Aalto University.
We hope to have more conclusive interpretations of the data on next week's blog.
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