2BCF: Week 6

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Monday was the last day of camp. We helped to conduct exit surveys with all of the students and pack up all the supplies to bring back to the warehouse. It was a bittersweet day.

I was helping this one student to fill out the survey, when the question, “What didn’t you like about camp?” popped up. Now, this particular student had caused problems all of camp and had complained every day. I was bracing myself for her response, when she said, “I loved everything. I loved the legos, 3D print pens, stop motion animation…my mom is buying me a 3D print pen for my birthday, because I know how to 3D print now!”

I was pretty blown away by her response. Even though she can complained every day, she had actually enjoyed herself. And this camp had actually made an impact on her that will continue on as she develops more design skills from practicing 3D printing. She even asked if she would see me again next year, and was bummed when I said I wouldn’t be returning.

Even though I hadn’t planned on helping out at a summer camp during my internship, it helped to remind me of why I do what I do. I love working with kids, playing, and spreading the joy of STEM.

Please enjoy these photos of me being dunked on the last day of camp in our own makeshift dunk tank.

After camp, we got back to work. I started to work with my co-intern Aubrey to program our Space Squad game. It had been a while since I used Unity and a little bit of an upward battle. I got buttons to attach and was able to get those working.

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We also decided this week to work together as a team to refine the puzzle box escape room for beta night. During camp, we ran a 3D printing program where students learned how to use 3D print pens. As an extra activity to reinforce learning, Jacob and Justin built a puzzle box escape room. Students had 15-20 minutes to build tools using the 3D print pens to unlock/solve the puzzle boxes. Testing with the students allowed them to get more data about how to make the puzzles more robust.

Given the success of this experience, we decided to work together as a team to refine this experience and test at Beta Night. Beta Night is an event held once a month at the Two Bit Circus Microamusement Park. Companies are invited to beta test their new experiences to the public for free. This was an opportunity for us to showcase our work to the corporate side of Two Bit Circus.

We split up tasks and worked on beginning to revise the puzzles and create all the additional materials necessary to bring the experience together.


2BCF: Week 5

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We continued to develop our Space Squad experience and also started to prototype out a projection mapping experience for the classroom. Both would be traveling activations that we could use to teach STEAM concepts.

For our Space Squad experience we wrote up an experience design doc. Turns out what I learned in my Experience Design class was super helpful! For that class, we created an experience design doc for every project that we worked on. This allowed the whole team to be on the same page about the experience. I used the same documentation from class for designing this experience.

I also learned about the MDA approach to game design from my co-intern Aubrey. Aubrey is currently enrolled in the Game and Interactive Media Design Masters program at USC. MDA stands for Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics. The theory states that designers start designing at the aesthetic stage, but players approach games from the mechanics stage.

Diagram from “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.”

Diagram from “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.”

Using this approach, we began to think about the aesthetics of our experience. We both agreed that we liked the sassy AI character in the Space Squad experience and wanted to apply that to our experience. We began writing the script and walking through the user flow.

For our projection mapping experience, I showed my team how to use HeavyM, a projection mapping software tool that we used in our Experience Design class at the ETC. I prototyped a simple set-up out of printer paper and tape, and used the projector in the classroom.

We started to discuss how we could teach students about color theory, creating mood, and setting a tone for your experience. As well as explaining how light works, diffraction, and why certain parts of your projection mapping will never look crisp.

I envisioned a curriculum in which students get to play around with the projection mapping software while listening to different types of music. Students could design experiences around their favorite songs.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I taught a class about Experience Design to the middle school students. The purpose was to gather data for my pitch project in the fall. Our pitch team wanted to know what middle school students thought were cool when it comes to museum experiences.

The goal was to conduct an informal active survey study to determine middle school students’ perception of museums/museum-like spaces or experiences, and what are middle school students’ interests/what do they find to be “cool” or engaging.

Most students did not think that museums were “cool” and assumed that museums were boring institutional settings. Students typically went to museums with their school. When shown examples of interactive museum experiences like The Museum of Ice Cream, students were excited about those types of experiences. Some students were also not sure if they had ever been to a museum or had never been to a museum.

Students were very much engaged in creating their own experiences and appreciated having the freedom to create what they wanted. They created a wide variety of experiences many referencing pop culture:

  • Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

  • Stranger Things

  • Marvel’s Avengers

  • Friday Night at Freddy’s

  • XXXTentacion

There were many game-themed experiences, and for the most part, boys thought that a video game themed or superhero exhibit would be cool. Boys also gravitated towards creating more scary or violent stations (i.e. a punching station to release negative energy). Girls typically created more self-expression related experiences such as a graffiti wall and selfie stations with props.

The students were very tapped into pop culture and sensitive to what is considered “cool” and age-appropriate. Older students took a longer time to sketch their prototypes and were more hesitant to attach themselves to an idea. What they choose to tell other people that they like is very important to them, because it defines their identity in the eyes of their peers. All of these students express themselves in different ways, but being heard is a constant theme.

See photos of all their amazing creations below! FYI he meant to spell I.S.S. (International Space Station).

2BCF: Week 4

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We finished up the Kern County Museum proposal, finalizing the slide deck and interactive learning stations. The museum was excited about our ideas and had no feedback. Which is great for us! Unfortunately due to the timeline, we won’t be able to start fabrication until the fall, so I won’t be able to be a part of this project. However, it’s always fun to work in the blue sky phase. Through this experience, I learned a lot about energy sources and thinking about how to build simple learning experiences for complex topics.

Mood board for Sustainable City concept.

Mood board for Sustainable City concept.

Given that camp was still in full swing this week, we were unable to work back at the office. Instead, myself and another intern worked on site developing a plan for the rest of the summer.

After the first week of camp, we realized that our Scratch & Makey Makey curriculum would not be feasible to execute with this camp given how difficult it was to run some of the more simple programs. This was as a result of a more hectic environment and how large class sizes were. So instead we decided to table that program, and work on really fully developing it.

Justin tasked us with designing a traveling activation piece that could be used to engage and educate students about building games with Makey Makey. It needed to be scalable in terms of age group and number of players, have a high thru-put, and be replayable.

We came up with two ideas:

  • A miniature kid-friendly travel version of Space Squad in Space (a story room designed by the corporate side of 2BC) - loosely inspired

Promotional image from 2BC website of Space Squad in Space.

Promotional image from 2BC website of Space Squad in Space.

  • A giant controller for a simple runner game - inspired by the giant NES controllers created by ETC students in 2004 for Building Virtual Worlds

Image from ETC website of giant NES controllers created by students during Building Virtual Worlds.

Image from ETC website of giant NES controllers created by students during Building Virtual Worlds.

While the latter would be extremely easy to execute, we decided that it would be more of a fun and educational experience for ourselves to do the former. Cheers to masochism!

We started to write up our experience design doc and come up with the core story component of this experience. This was a short week due to the July 4th, so we were unable to get as much done as we had hoped. In addition, even though I wasn’t teaching anymore, the students still asked me to play with them during recess. How could I say no??

2BCF: Week 3

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Camp started in Hawthorne, and we were responsible for helping out with the first week of programming. Specifically, I helped teach a stop motion animation class and 3D print pens class.

Having mentored and run an afterschool school science fair program for low-income/high-need students in college, I was familiar with working with at-risk youth. A constant thread throughout my career has been working to promote STEAM education in this demographic. It’s something that I constantly think about in the projects that I decide to take on.

However, in my previous role at NOVA, I didn’t get many opportunities to directly engage with my audience. Working at summer camp was a great reminder of how many design parameters are involved when creating experiences for this demographic.

At camp, we had a ratio of 1:10, one facilitator to ten students, and even that felt chaotic. In a normal classroom, one teacher is typically managing 25-30+ students. So when designing experiences for the classroom, you have to consider the facilitator’s involvement. The best case scenario is that the experience does not require a facilitator, so that the teacher can spend their time providing one-on-one help to students and putting out the inevitable constant fires (aka projectile vomiting, bleeding, and fist fights).

Getting students’ attention is tough. Especially, when they don’t know you, they won’t listen. My co-facilitator Max bribed students to pay attention and behave by using his body. And by that I mean demoing yo-yo tricks and handstands. It actually worked like a charm. By the end of camp, Max was running his own gymnastics camp during recess.

An activity must be fun and challenging enough for students to be engaged. Older students need wider parameters for activities so that they can self-express, while younger students need a lot more hand-holding. Students are hypersensitive to what is age-appropriate to them.

But if the activity is too hard, students will tune out. For the 3D print pens curriculum, students were challenged to build the tallest tower possible using the 3D print pens. The younger students really struggled with this and were discouraged easily. For the younger students it made more sense to provide them with templates and to let them have free play. While the older students could be incentivized to do more difficult engineering challenges with prizes.

I also had forgotten how hypersensitive students are to social constructs. Especially the middle schoolers; it’s not “cool” to be smart and it’s not “cool” to work hard. No matter what YOU say or do, it’s not cool (even if they really think its cool, they’ll never tell you). Middle schoolers are a tough audience, and having to work around that is difficult as well.