My goals for week 6 were to: meet with various mentors and receive important feedback, continue fabricating pop-ups, create more circuits, work on scheduling the second round of user testing, and continue making illustrations.
We were able to meet with Chris Hill and received some really important items to consider in regard to materials and directions our book could take; Chris gave us a ton of ideas that you can read about below in my mentor reviews section, and I am really glad we were able to meet with him. We will be meeting with Ruhan today (2/16) to do another mentor review.
We ended up spending most of our time this week on learning Silhouette Studio, a resource given to us by Ruhan; Silhouette Studio will allow us to easily cut out our illustrations and be much quicker than cutting everything by hand. We watched a ton of videos and had multiple accounts of trial and error. We plan to discuss this with Ruhan in our next meeting and figure out why our illustrations were not being cut properly.
While more circuit work wasn't acquired this week, we did create another pop-up featuring new illustrations; we found that we need to be careful with how thin we make some of the illustrations because illustrations that are too thin may rip or break. In addition, I am done with almost every scene and character and should be able to finish up with my illustrations over the next week. With our illustrations being done, we will be able to focus more on the fabrication and circuits aspect of our project.
In terms of user testing, I did reach out to a parent, Amanda, who lives in the Boulder area and has a 10 year old we could potentially test. I am waiting to hear back from her. My partner, Alexandra, has a friend with a 9 year old niece that we will be able to user test with this week as well. Unfortunately, Ruhan let us know that the elementary schoolers she usually tests with don't have time for our user testing, so we plan to discuss our options more with Ruhan and plan to do some testing at Boulder Public Library.
