Mentor Check-In: Ruhan Yang

Our sponsor and one of our mentors for our project is Ruhan Yang. She is a graduate student who works on projects centered around interactions for children, and some of these projects involve paper interactions such as paper circuits and augmented reality over paper surfaces. She is currently sponsoring a project that involves using paper circuits to create interactions for children through a creative outlet such as a children's pop-up book.

Ruhan is willing to give us advice for our approach to the design process of our book, such as the materials and tools to use, ideas for our story and interactions, and user testing. We've been asking her questions in regards to these areas.

Writing Children's Stories

Ruhan gave us some tips while we were writing our story and thinking about our target age group. Since we've never written a children's book before, it was interesting to hear some tips she had about it. The first one was that our story should feature a character that is slightly older than our target audience, so for example a story targeted at ages 8-10 could feature a 12-year old protagonist. The reason for this is that children tend to look up to children who are older than them and therefore would find an older protagonist more interesting than a younger one. She also pointed out that children are smart and can figure out story themes and interactions more easily then we might first think, so as long as our ideas aren't complicated we shouldn't be too worried about children not understanding the components of our project.

User Testing

Ruhan has been trying to help us get in touch with more children to test the components in our project. So far she hasn't been able to get the nearby elementary schools on board with our testing due to their busy schedules, so she suggested that we look for children from amongst friends and people we know, or to go to the Boulder Public Library with our project and see if we could get permission to test it on the children there. She mentioned that it is important to give testers an introduction of who we are, what our project is about, and what our goals are for testing (such as a list of our interview questions).

Materials and Tools

Ruhan always reminds us to update a running list of materials we need so that she can acquire them for us. Some materials she was able to provide for us include cardstock and nylon tape. The main tool she encourages us to use is the Cameo 4 vinyl cutter, in which she showed us how to operate the machine and the software for formatting the shapes to cut. In general she encourages us to come to her with any questions we may have concerning our project and lab resources.