Week 11 — Pre-Thesis
Great week, I’ve somehow changed directions entirely for my project after speaking with more and more people. So, I haven’t gotten much done in terms of prototyping, but a lot of research has been done.
Initially, my goal and aim was to see how technology could be used to in a sense automate differentiation of instruction for things like learning disabilities and learning styles. And for the demo of the project I would’ve targeted a few learning disabilities and learning styles and showcased how that design addresses that issue and then theorize on how that could be used more to ease the burden on teachers. The goal was to use Twine and then adapt that to a VR experience.
From last week post: Moving forward, this summer I will take the storylines from Twine and learn/place them into GameMaker Studio and VR World to provide a more developed demo for the thesis portion of this class. I hope to finish the storylines in Twine by the end of this semester. As for the other components of the demo, those are a little more less involved, so I’ll be able to create those using applications I’m more familiar and comfortable with.
I still want to do that, but before that, there’s also an issue of the usage of technology in the classroom in general. A lot of teachers are still undertrained and underfunded in terms of using technology effectively in the classroom. I met with the advisor this week who suggested thinking about how a gamified tech framework could be used for teachers to adapt their own lessons in a format that is compeling for students, something that doesn’t require years of development as my proposed technology would. It would be sort of like a DIY adapt your lesson into a digital game.
I’m leaning more towards that now, mostly because, after speaking with some other professors, some have suggested that the VR/Build a Game, doesn’t meet the mark of the questions I’m trying to find out more about. So, this week, I’m confused, but hopefully, by next week I can grasp onto something that is more practical and develop a game plan to attack it.
Additionally, the thing with technology is that it provides the user multiple ways to interact with the content: visual, auditory and your kinesthetic learnings — so maybe there’s a way to do this and engage all of those learners while allowing the teacher to use this to create something themselves rather than rely on a publishing company to continually produce content. I’m imagining the deliverables would end up being a framework and user guide for doing so.
Final Deliverables: