Monday, March 14, 2016

Journal Entry #4

        If you haven’t seen the topic of my final project, it’s The Story Behind Abraham Lincoln’s Grave Robbers.  I narrowed it down to this after feedback from the Desk Crits and Journal Feedback, as well as polling my students. I’ve explored with the features in Storyline like Audio and Layouts and Layers through our weekly assignments.  I learned a lot in how to add and use the various Animations Storyline offers.  The upcoming Variables and Interactions sections of Storyline should add more components to my final project.
As far as the progress with my final project, I’ve done some minor rough drafting as I’ve learned more and more in Storyline.  Where I’m stuck at is how I want to tell the story of the grave robbers who attempted to steal Lincoln’s body.  The cast of characters, including a gang of Chicago counterfeiters who plot to steal Lincoln’s body and a double agent that infiltrated the gang, all make some major blunders that make it seem more fiction than non-fiction.  I know I want to make it interactive and include choices throughout it, but I also want to keep it factual with what happened that night.  I’m thinking that I want to go back and forth between the point of view of the different characters, and not tell just a linear story from beginning to end.

The reading for this week, “Designing Interactions,” was interesting.  A main point Moggridge made was that designers have to understand who their users are.  He explains how they used the four categories “Learn, Look, Ask, and Try” to learn more about their users to help them design projects.  The “Try” section made me think how I use my Advanced Writing class as a sort of guinea pigs sometimes.  I teach them first thing in the morning and get their opinions on certain things and their interests as they filter in off the buses.  They often surprise me, and it reminds me that I don’t always know everything about my target audience!

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