What we accomplished

This week we spent a lot of time thinking about and iterating on our design. The team all met each other and we initially decided on pursuing a project called Symbolia which focused on allowing the user to evaluate math expressions and simple programming concepts by allowing the user to draw these in 3D space. We spent a pretty significant amount of time thinking about what project to pursue before deciding on this one, and we created a website and various pieces of concept art for Symbolia, since we thought that this work was due on Thursday. On Thursday, the course staff did not like our idea so we had to start from scratch. We spent a significant amount of time on Thursday and Friday thinking about ideas and how the implementation would look like and we eventually settled on trying to focus on somehwat novel hand tracking technology to teach a user programming concepts.

The project that we decided to pursue is called Blockly, which is an environment where users can learn how to program by introducing various ways that a user can perform fundamental programming concepts (ie. looping, variable assignment, etc) using hand motions to control a block. We spent a good amount of time on Saturday redoing our work to create a brand new website, concept art, a video, and this blog post! We still need to work out a few aspects of our design, but we feel fairly confident about the main ideas.

Plan for next week

Our main goal for next week will be to really hammer down on the exact specifics of how users will learn programming from our system (ie. what is the user interface, what exact hand commands should correspond to which programming concepts). Our deliverable will be a finished PRD that will give us a good plan moving forward. We hope to get our environments all set up for programming in Unity and by the end of the week (ie. after we finish our PRD) we want to be ready to start implementing a prototype a prototype.

Notes