Week 6 Progress

These were our goals for this week:

• Continue making illustrations, pop-ups, and circuits

• Schedule user testing with contacts

• Meet with mentors

We spent most of our time this week trying to figure out the program for using the vinyl cutter. We were able to get as far as making a cut of our desired shapes, however the machine was cutting it at a slanted angle and therefore it was completely off. We hope to resolve this issue with Ruhan in our next meeting, as cutting our shapes with the vinyl cutter is essential for reducing the time we spend working on our project during each of our meetings.

We completed another page prototype of our story, and some observations that I got out of it was that the illustrations should not have parts that are thinner than 4mm, as they are more prone to breaking when cutting them out or installing them to the page. The pop-ups with the 2D illustrations work best with a basic v-fold, and we can cut out parts of this stand to make objects and characters appear less 2D-like in a 3D space while still keeping them upright.

Ruhan got back to us about the elementary school students, which was that unfortunately they don't have time in their schedules to let us come in to do user testing. Ruhan will discuss further options in our upcoming meeting, which may include places such as the Boulder Public Library.

Once we have more prototype pages and circuits done this week I can hand some off to my friend to test on his 9-year-old niece. We still need to schedule meetings with other contacts, which we may do in our upcoming meeting.

We met with one of our mentors, Chris Hill, to show him our progress so far. The details of this meeting is in this mentor check-in post. Although he wasn't as familiar with paper circuits specifically, he gave us some good ideas for some possible interactions and materials we could use. We plan to do a mentor review with Ruhan in our next meeting on Wednesday, 2/16.