Our goals for Week 8 were to: conduct more user tests (ask about interest in circuits before and after trying them out), look into video documentation of children interacting with popups/circuits, construct everything out of cardstock, acquire a regular pop-up book to use as a comparison, keep working on the narrator aspect and getting the circuits to work, look into pull-tabs and other potential interactions, and keep working on final remaining illustrations.
This week I continued to work on remaining illustrations. Right now, I am working on creating elements for a playground scene where Willie talks to his friends about his situation. I have already created the new facial expressions as well as created a tire swing set. I am still working on adding a slide and maybe one other playground item. I am pretty close to finishing my all illustrations, but I was not able to finish them this past week because I spent quite a bit of time prepping for our user testing sessions.
Alexandra and I kept working on the narrator bee element and were able to finally get it to work with the use of some small magnets Ruhan gave us; the magnets were able to hold everything in place on the bee as well as allow us to set up a proper connection when placed down on the existing circuit lines. Since we received such positive feedback with this circuit, we plan to continue with this exposed circuit style and letting our audience receive an up close and personal circuit learning experience.
While Alexandra worked on recreating the garden scene with pull tabs, I did a lot of research on the regular popup book we could use for user testing. I found that there were pretty few popup books that were targeted up to 10 years old, so I had to use my best judgement to decide on what book would work best. I found The Color Monster book and was instantly intrigued by its appearance. As I looked further into this book, I found that it was rated for ages 3-7 years old, which almost hits our age group. The book had really interesting popups and even had a pull tab page; I felt that this book would be a great comparison because it has the professional qualities I wanted to achieve with our book. From our user testing, we found that this book indeed is a strong comparison to our own book and that we can take qualities that our users like in this book, such as its "animations", and work on putting that into our own book.
