Week3 Zoom meeting

In week4, Lorna had an online meeting with us to give answers to our confusions about the changes of our physical computing teaching plan. Our confusions mainly focus on how can we build our project individually at home without tools like saws, laser cutter, etc and what scale our individual project should be compared with group project. Lorna gave us accurate and patient response, which can help us make a plan for the rest time of this semester.

Week3 Group meeting

After the Zoom meeting, we conduct a group meeting focus on our current idea and prepared for the presentation of next week. In the previous meeting we conducted last week, we have already decide our idea, which is a creative learning game for teenagers to help them learn coding in a more enthusiastic way. So in order to help the audience understand our idea in the presentation next week, we communicated about the structure of our slides and divided the work.

After a long time discussion, we decided to make our slides according to the structure below:

Introduction of project and team in general

• Team’s name:BEE BEAR LION
• Background:Problems solving
• Inspirations:Chessboard at CES 2019
• Purpose
• Target Audience
• Concept
• Storyboard
• Plan
• Prototype/Body-storming
• The body storming part was assigned to Bowen, and the other three group members's task is making the presentation slides. The part I should make in the slide is about our concept and story board. Finally I have to make a video to combine all our works into one video and upload it to the youtube list.

We also prepared three questions at the last page of our slides, these three questions are all about technical problems:

• How to make the character move and turn right/left?
• How to make the camera detect the QR code (Marker) and translate it into code in our computer?
• Which programming language can help us control the movement of robots? Can we use Javascript?

Week4 Contact

In the two contact of this week, we present our idea on the class. the contact class was conducted online via zoom. After our presentation, we got a lot of feedback from our classmates, and we summarized the following points from the feedback:

• Explore the gap between plaint-language and coding language
• Change the target audience from age 9-12 to the people who never learn coding language (the age is not enough specific for our project, cuz there may a lot of children already had the foundation of coding)
• Maze — Box moving (From Zebing Yao, Clay 'I think keeping the robot in the maze is limiting')
• This would allow for the robot to modify its own code being able to correct your code. (From Clay)

So in the next session, the first change of our concept is that we are going to change the idea of the maze into a push box game, which let the player control the robot to push the box to the specified position by coding.

As for the robot, we have several ideas to achieve the function.

• The first idea is using the Nintendo Labo robot as the character, this robot can move forward, backward or turn left and right by the vibration of the joycon. But this robot is not programmable, so this idea was abandoned in later discussions
• The second idea is using Anki vector smart robot, which is programmable and is very suitable for our current concept.
• The last idea is using Arduino to build our own robot.