Project Design and Development
This project was something rather novel working in the realm of augmented reality, as I did not have a lot of previous experience with utilizing this kind of technology, especially in conjunction with language learning, which I am passionate about. It was fun to challenge myself in this way.
In terms of the design process, I think the literature review and supporting theories could be more thorough, as I would like to have the chance to dig deeper into existing research; put more thought in creating more robust scaffolded levels for language learners; and create supplemental potential user surveys to flesh out the usability testing.
As an example:
We changed our original idea of creating scaffolding levels based on the decreasing percentage of home language labels to increased delays in when the language labels will show up. This decision was made later in our design development, and though I think it is a better idea, I wished we had more background research to back it up.
If we had more time, I would like to develop the mock-up of our software a little more to create a more realistic demo of what could be achieved with the MyWebAR tools, to illustrate our concept and make it feel more grounded, concrete and feasible.
Collaboration and Teamwork
Bella, Jamie and Jennifer provided a lot of interesting observations from their hands-on experience working with elementary students in a classroom setting. From their teacher’s perspective and the observations they provided, we quickly identified an existing problem that new immigrant students were struggling with. This reminded me of my own experiences trying to integrate into new classroom environments with a complete language barrier when I was younger.
Though I do not work with students directly, I was able to provide some of the design-thinking to the project from my experiences in research as well as creating learning content for language instructors, and contributed to the project in a different way.
All four of us worked collectively on the project proposal, report and slides.
Jamie took on the main responsibility for creating the AR demo in MyWebAR. Though the tool claimed to be rather easy for beginners to create AR elements, it seemed like it was also rather limited in what it could actually do. Jamie did a great job of creating an alternative user interface that demonstrated what we needed it to do.
I think one of the main challenges was finding time to work collaboratively together, as Jennifer was in a drastically different time zone. Sometimes Bella, Jamie and I we would block off time and work together on the project together, which I personally found super helpful.
Moving forward, one project management skill I would like to develop is creating clearer project objectives with actionable items and deadlines to ensure that we all know what needs to be done within what timeframe. I believe this will help drastically with group projects in the future.