Brainstorming for Csc485B

First day of the course i did not expect that the course would be about creating a visual language for children to program animatronic robots. The project and the chance to work in a huge group sounds like a lot of fun. I will be really interested to find out the way that this project will pane out and what approach we take.

As mentioned in the first class, everyone was to think about ideas on how to tackle the project and satisfy the client as well the users. I have thought about the overall project and have come up with some fundamental ideas that the project should incorporate so that the project can be successful.

The following ideas are what i think about the initial set up of the solution:

1) It should utilize a medium which children have already experienced and are comfortable in working in. That is why the environment that children should use to visually program the robots is an interactive website. The website should take on a cartoon-style feel. Utilizing web technology should create a dynamic environment in developing whatever would be most visual to a child and still be familiar.

2) The website environment should take note that children work on the process of trying things and seeing what happens. The process of trial and error should be taken into account when creating the visual language and make it possible for children to easily create a program and than be able to almost instantly see what it does to the animatronic robot.

3) The website environment should also have the ability for children to save their programs and also share them by either emailing them to others or saving them on a memory drive so that children can share and learn from one another.

The visual language itself would really depend on the age group of the users. For younger children a language that bundles the robots actions into modules like "waving", "smiling" and other would be best. However, older children could have less abstraction so that the children can have the ability to fine tune a robots action.