Hello Class-

It has been many weeks since I posted and I apologize. The Verizon 5G project has been quite a distraction.

Getting ready for Play Tech required us to do one more trip to LCCS on April 1st. We thought that we could do this trip through the collaborative VR classroom in rumii. It turned out to be much less intuitive and more complicated to make experiences in rumii than we thought. We could have taught you all how to access your rumii account but it was already difficult enough to communicate in Zoom. Soon we will have enough Oculus Go HMDs so that we can attempt to communicate with our teams.

Progress on all projects continues and we will all be testing our projects at Play Tech tomorrow, April 13th.

Trash Trivia is testing their full Family Feud-style game (Bolor and Raquel with a team of enthusiastic game designers).
Greener Grass will test pre-visualization of Farmer John’s troubles with farm run-off pollution made with Co-spaces (Milo, Zhane, Gingerale)
Ocean Odyssey will test their projection in the dome that Jose de Jesus put up on the 12th floor of 6 E 16th Street (Qiyao, Olivia, Fuad, Harry and Jessica) .
Polluters and Protectors will be testing their field game (Evan and Owen from LCCS).

We will also be testing the Under the Hudson Bay Scavenger Hunt experience in rumii.

It will be really busy day but it will help us make our projects really great user experiences for Earth Day two weeks from now.

Break a Leg everyone!!!

As a teacher, a class like this is formed through years of practice of what works and doesn’t. There are flaws in the process of ideating together in a short amount of time. One thing that happens is that everyone becomes very excited and talkative through the process. The end of the class was a bit messy but we achieved our aims. OK–they are still going to go through quite a bit of:

1. Research for inspiration and accurate information
2. Creative exploration so that we can arrive at playable and fun experiences.
3. Aesthetic development of the look and feel for each project
4. A common thread that will tie the entire arc of the stories together. What does a farmer (Greener Grass) who at first fouls the river with his farm chemicals have to do with a game about Trash Trivia? Or how can we tie the Ocean Odyssey to the Polluters and Protectors?  We have to all think hard on this and come up with entertaining and educational answers.We also have to settle on final venues so that we can organize the kind of production that each experience needs.  In two weeks, we should have answers…

Thanks to those of you who were on the Zoom call today. We already see some really great creative ideas coming about. Please pitch to the blog what you think is a great storyline and a great way to make it an Earth Day experience. Whether it is in the Dome, a game (physical or digital), a VR immersive experience, a VR 360 Gear role play movie etc. etc. We also look forward to your 5-week assessments. These are totally confidential. You can tell us how you feel about the class so far and how we can make it better. Looking forward to seeing your blog posts. Remember that they don’t have to be long!

We traveled to see our colleagues in Jersey City yesterday. We would love to know what you thought of the whole experience. From the moment we met on Fifth Avenue to the PATH train to the taxi to LCCS. We were met by Tammy and she introduced us to the LCCS students and Kimberley Smith, their teacher. What did you think of the class, the goals, the ideas we discussed? What did you learn? What do you think the LCCS students learned? Be as detailed as you can be with these notes, we will need them at the end of the project. I will post your assignment for the 25th in an email announcement. Look for the PPT we used yesterday in the Files folder on Canvas. Looking forward to the next adventure!