Talking with Butcher

On February 8th and 15th, we had a chance as a group to talk with Kirsten Butcher, our Human-Computer Interaction teacher, about our meetings with the Museum and our on going unfolding of the classification module. Her feedback has been very helpful. We have been stressing to come up with a design that keeps our clints happy, while at the same time being true to good design principles.

It seems that Museum wants to take the classroom experience of helping students learn to classify and put it on the computer. The problem with this is that they are two different ways to teaching, with different strengths and limitations. Face to face interaction allows the instructor to give verbal and non-verbal feedback to students based on their observation of the students. A computer doesn't pick up on non-verbal cues from people. It cannot see that a student is becoming frustrated due to a lack of understanding and then adjust the instruction to solve that problem. One of the strengths of a computer is being able to give honest, instantaneous feeback to an individual student.

So, after with talking with Dr. Butcher, we realize we need to be better at designing a learning module that draws on the strengths of computer technology- honest, instantaneous feedback. Students need to interact with a module that provides scaffolding, direction toward the scientific focus of classifying, and feedback that helps them see that they have been successful or that they made a mistake.

Now fast forward to today, Febuary 11th. We presented a ROUGH prototype of our project to our capstone class, taught by Dr. Zheng. We received great feedback from classmates (i.e.- when a student picks a characteristic to classify by and clicks a radio button, the pictures of each bird could zoom in on that feature to help students focus on one thing and to give them a close-up view of the feature they picked). Dr. Zheng talked about the interactivity of the concept attainment part of our project. He was wondering if we were going to ask students what good classication was, or were we just going to tell them. We need to ensure that students are given 0pportunity to discover or the activity won't fit the description of a concept attainment activity. He also wanted to us to address students background knowledge of birds. We need to make sure learners understand enough about birds to know what characteristics they will be using to classify them. Dr. Zheng also was happy about the phrase that learners would being asked to "create their own exhibits at the museum".