Planning focus session

Interactive
Solution Planning Guide
This provides some guidance to help plan your interactive solution. Review
the questions in the Planning Guide to help you decide what your solution will
be about – to better conceptualise it.
Who is it for?
*Is it for students, what age group? Adults,
technical folk? Non-technical folk?
Is it for one person at a time, or a group of people?
Are people going to share information? Compete?

The age group will be year 9 and GCSE students.

The information is going up on to the website so that it can be seen and shared by many, this could lead to the users becomming competative but that is not the sole intention of the product.
The age group typically uses social networking websites, so will be accustomed to using a website where there are discussions or live chats.

because we are targetting the children to encourage them and their sciences we will also be targetting the parents and teachers as they willperhaps have to get the children to get in touch with the website.
This could be linked from choices websites which parents and children of this age group have to look over before they choose their GCSE subjects

What is it for?
What are the aims for your interactive solution for this user group?
The aim of the product is to make users aware of robots and the physics behind them. It is also a chance to make people aware of the university.

It is targetted at an age group which is choosing their GCSE subjects and this product will hopefully promote sciences and therefore prompt students to be more enthusiastic about these subjects.

Which one(s) are you going to focus on?
*What do you want your solution to do? What kind of interactivity ?

The product will be an interactive page which allows for users to leave comments about different robots, this will envcourage discussions between the users. The website will be encouraging an age group which already use social networking to use a networking tool to communicate about science.

What time period will its usage be over?
Does it have to be in a specific time/place or could it be over a period
of time? Is it time-limited?
Do you want people to do things in a particular order? Do they need to
have prior access, register?

because this is a product where the users can talk to eachother and chat, having a user log in would help to prevent some spamming and would also act as another small safety barrier.

Perhaps having a log in and register which requires a school address in order to allow for a user to be registered would act as another safety barrier so that this product is speciafically for students, although this is limiting.

During a school lesson, so allowing for introduction and review at the end it may be used for around 25 mins

Time limit set by the teacher 

Registration is in at 2 levels, one higher access for the school and the teacher to set the work and one for the students. 

How long is the experience/interaction meant to last? Or is there no set
time?

There could be a number of lessons running over a period, for example a term each with knowledge building on the last so the order could be important

Where and how will it be used?
Will it be from home? Or at
work? Or at school? On the move on a mobile device? On an interactive touch
screen?

It will be used at school but could also be used at home because home work has been set. 

How are you trying to make people feel? What is the intended “user
experience”?
* Excited? Reflective? Interested in the technology?
Interested in the event?
This will affect what sort of content, media and images you create or
use, as well as your overall themes – colours/fonts/layout/tone

This is educational to introduce the children to Robotics,  it should be fun and exciting for them to keep their interest and stimulate their creativity. 

What will the person take the initiative in the interaction or will the
system? What will drive the interaction process?
Will people have to look at the screen and click on the areas or
specific interaction objects or will the system be automatically updated and
prompt the person?

The child will be asked to do things by the system and the system will record the result. 

What sort of content will you collect or make?
The focus will be on using content that
enables a high level of interactivity, is engaging and is of course relevant to
the context. Where will you get your content from?

The system will collect text and images via embedded drawing software, 

Will it need to be kept updated? Who will do
the updating? How often? What level of expertise will they need to have? Will
they need an interface? Will there be privacy, access right issues?

As part of a school term syllabus the updating will be done by a teacher who will have higher access rights than the children

Will the end-users supply content?
What will the nature of the content be?
Will moderation be required? Where will the
data be stored? Will there be privacy, access right issues?
What about simultaneous multi-user usage?
What are the implications for this?

The children as the end user are reply to work set by the teacher. The teacher will be responsible for moderation, although being that this is a classroom situation the children should be aware that they’ll be punished for adding inappropriate content.

The data collected will be stored in a MySQL database