For our mentor reviews, we met with Ruhan Yang (one of our sponsors in the ACME Lab) and Tina Strieter (a teacher with experience teaching 4th graders).
Ruhan
In our meeting with Ruhan, our main question we asked was about how to fabricate the actual book. We have a bunch of individual pages, but we were not sure how to connect pages into one cohesive book. Ruhan explained her strategy. She creates 10 mm tabs on the ends on the pages and from there she is able to simple glue the tabs together. This was extremely helpful to us, especially since we were given a visual aid as well.
Other than discussing book making techniques, Ruhan did not really have any feedback for us because we already meet weekly.
Tina
This review was the first time we had shown our project to a 4th grade teacher, so we got quite a bit of feedback regarding her thoughts on the project. Overall, she really loved our project! We showed her the story, examples of the pop-ups, and some of the circuits/interactions.
She felt that the story was extremely relevant for 8-10 year olds in such a technological age and that we had really thought out the story, pop-ups, and interactions. She thought the appearance of the pop-ups really brought the story to life. She wasn't clear exactly on the narrator bee and how it would be "narrating" the story, so we need to work on making this concept clearer. She really liked the added aspect of being able to easily teach children about circuits in a way that they can comprehend.
"As a teacher I can see myself using this book for a variety of learning objectives: creativity, literacy, technology/science, social emotional, and creative problem-solving."