We had our ETC playtest on wednesday and it was also run along with Jesscia Hammer who wanted to give feedback on our works progress. The solo mode game play was very well accepted and understood by the playtesters. There was some confusion among the rules of the party mode when the playtesters started playing. After playtest feedback we realised the game mechanic though being solid was easy to understand. So we reiterated the party mode game rules with much simpler format

We also run playtest with highschool students on 10/23/15 and got various feedback on the solo made and started working on the UI iterations and few feature tweaks required as expressed by the playtesters.

Amy was working on few of the design elements for the game and the app. Kanglei was developing the app as required by the wireframes while Adarsh was building up the quiz mode for playing with two person. Ladera and Amy paired up on finalizing and converting the UI wireframes into workable design doc along side with Ruchi. This week was a development sprint and involved less design work on the game and more development work from the whole team

We also documented our designs so far to give it to our clients for monthly hand off. The end of the week works went towards the quarters walkoarounds. We got a lot of valuable feedback. We categorized the issues we have got so far and decided on assigning our  team members action items for the identified issues.

This week most of the team’s focus was concentrated on finishing and polishing the branding materials. Our logo had gone one final polishing before locking it. Our previous weeks progress on the poster and the half sheets were presented to the branding walkaround faculty. They gave few suggestions which were helpful. Both Amy and Ruchi were working simultaneously to make respective changes and corrections. Our faculty instructors also gave some valuable corrections and suggestions. We had our branding workshop on wednesday where all the teams showed their posters, and everyone tried to criticize and get positive output from each other. One valuable input was to reduce the size of poster subjects so that when real poster is printed they are in optimal size.

We also met with our client contact Joalene on thursday where we proposed our solution of solving the challenge mode by introducing the  party mode method which was devised by us. The client were pretty much interested and would like to see a full fleshed idea on its implementation. We also met with Mike christel to help us on framing the questions for our initial survey which we will send to Joalene later.

Ladera was working on reviewing the finalized branding material before they were submitted on friday. He was also worked on compositing the team photo. The output of the composition captured everyone’s attention. In part of the branding materials Team Akili’s output was top notch.

This week was mainly focused to devise a strategy to  approach the problem given to us. From the last weeks meet with Manuel we have come to know the priorities of the issues to be addressed by us.

Ruchi and Amy were working on multiple iterations to complete the poster.

The team decided to come up with user personas to give a feeling what our final app might look. This helped us and the client to understand clearly how well the information has been transformed. We also came across a lot of hindrances which raised many questions and also clearly understand what we have understood so far.

We also made a small matrix of trivia, challenge vs solo, competition to easily come up with the basic game play modes that we should be implementing. This has clarified the whole team properly as we fixed on certain modes.

During the weekend we had a fun filled team photo shoot. We conceptualized that we we are part of the brain and as we are trying to make students learn life skills too we felt it’s hard challenge and felt like inception. So we tried using the inception concept. Ladera conceptualized and prepare rough compositing before photographing

And took some groupie pictures too

The second week began with brainstorming sessions, doubts and questions which needed more attention to make a clear understanding about the project. We also wanted to come up our own set of goals which we wanted to learn by doing the project.

We started to come up with ideas of how our game should be. How the user flow will happen.What are the game mechanics, triggering elements. We also had a discussion whether having a story will help the game. We figured that in this type of game the story should be very much minimalistic as possible as that is just to aid the experience and will not be our core experience for the game.

Next question was whether to have real time multiplayer mode. This also tied up on making a major technical decision. We started on devising game modes. We came up with

• Practice mode
• Competition mode
• Scavenger hunt

There were some discussions on the theming but we felt that we shouldn’t make any major decision on it because we needed more info on our demographic and also research on it as it included students from Tanzania.
On Friday we had meet with Manuel Mattke the Chief Innovation Officer of OEF. We had a short meet with him discussing on the leveling and how to address the challenge mode.

The fall semester 2015 began and our new project team met each other at 2404 ETC. The whole team was excited about the new project and everyone was energized because of the summer. Initially the team was unclear on the project idea since we were unsure of the requirements from our client “Opportunity Education Foundation”. We met with our team advisers that day and had a formal introduction to each other and their interests. The advisers gave a brief idea on what the clients were expecting from the ETC project team. After the meeting we were supposed to finalize our role and various responsibilities for the project.

Our first task as a team was to decide on the name for the team. Without spending a lot of time we came up with AKILI which means bright and smart in the swahili language. Having an african word would give a personal touch and always keep us motivated for the fact that we are working for betterment of the youth all around the world. Once the team name was decided our artist Ruchi started sketching out few typography to be used for the logo. Amy also joined to sketchup few mock logos. Ladera started taking care of the initial logistics for setup and the team’s extra requirements for tech. Adarsh and Kanglei had a brief discussion on choosing the asset manager.

We scheduled our first client meeting on 9/3/15 and started preparing questions and possible doubts that we might encounter in the meeting. We got few resources and client documents before hand. We had an hour long meet with Joalene and Manuel about the previous work on the OEF and their requirements for us. We had a detailed conversation and almost all our questions and doubts were cleared. After the client meet we had a short discussion within our team about the project and how the project should be headed. We also split responsibilities according to the project. A Raci chart and the core hour timings were decided and put up.

The next day we had a brainstorming session and we came with various ideas and how to tackle the project requirements and whether there was another way to accomplish the goal from the client’s suggested version. We summarized what we discussed and formulated a rough trivia game design which the client needs. It was a productive session and also gave the whole team a rough picture what our end product will look like. We also started playing few trivia games to get the feel from an audience and user standpoint. By the end of the week we also managed to go for a team hangout which seemed to be the pathway for new friendship among the team members.

To summarize, in the first week we did not spend lot of time on trivial things like deciding names, roles and not coming up with something new idea for the problem. We made sure that the first week goals were completed and had a good start. For the following week we will send our client our rough draft of our idea to make sure whether we both are on the same page. We will be discussing that with our advisers and get their inputs to catalyst our brainstorming session. We also booked an appointment with Jesse Schell to get more ideas and thoughts. And so the things are set in motion.