BLACKSBURG, Va., April 3, 2015 – This week was an important week for the team Kool Katz, consisting of the three developers, Laura Avakian, Seth Canon, and Ryan Kiel. Kool Katz began their development of the Civil War Driving Tour app.
Last week, the team presented to their professor and their HCI class, acting as potential users, and described the project. They presented the general overview of the project, the current state, where they are going, gave a demonstration of their medium fidelity prototype using Prototyping on Paper (POP).
Seth was out of town and unfortunately not able to work with the group this week, but Laura and Ryan were able to make progress setting up version control for their project and creating a skeletal design of the app on Xcode.
One of the issues pointed out during the Go/No Go presentation that occurred the previous week was that it did not necessarily encompass enough of a social component. It was suggested that we pursue integrating this in order to fulfill the project requirements.
“[A] reason to pursue this direction is to align with the course theme of ‘creative social computing’. Without the user generated content angle, I’m not yet convinced that the project fulfills either the social or creative component,” says Professor Luther.
The client, Paul Quigley, requested it be a bare-bones driving tour, so to satisfy both his and Luther’s concerns, Laura and Ryan brainstormed and came up with a solution. The team will be integrating a running feed of comments with each individual site. Because this is a driving tour, information pertaining to recent weather, traffic, etc may be valuable to others taking the tour. People will be able to comment with suggestions or just to give a “heads up” about certain things. Additionally, history buffs may want to add their tidbits about the sites for whoever is interested.
Next week, the team will continue development and start to divide down to working on the actual features themselves — starting with the presentation of the tour sites. Stay tuned!
Contact Laura Avakian for any further inquiries.
