Educational business models

There are two companies which offer very different models of business I will investigate in this post.

http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/
http://www.espresso.co.uk/

Sparklebox contains completely free printable resources for primary school teachers, containing activities for many different subjects, 1000s of different areas. It makes money by using filtered safe, google ads. Although after researching it is a meager allowance as in estimation through http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.sparklebox.co.uk  the site is only worth £19591.34 (therefore the company) not really reeling in the cash, and in terms of its cred, it doesn't seem to have any real in depth academic background, the whole feel of the website is terrible and barely functional. There are some links into the community ...

http://sparklebox.blogspot.com/ the blog actually gives a nice view into the the inner workings and all the problems that cybloks upon its release might have... for example there was an interesting problem in regards to accessibility in primary schools to the website, as they introduced community aspects into the website such as twitter, facebook and myspace etc... which meant that the schools internet network would ban the site, this meant it wasn't able to be accessed from within the school, causing many issues. Theres an in depth article stating how it was fixed relating to acceptance on trusted site networks.

• "Google Friend Connect elements have been completely removed.
• Visitors can no longer comment on photos in the Gallery, resources in the Sharing Zone or books in our Books area
• Visitors can no longer submit resources or photos in the Gallery or Sharing Zone
• Links to Twitter remain absent from our sites" 
  

  

Second visiting Chasewater primary school

Before we went to Chacewater primary school in cornwall, we got all the prototype models prepared and this time it included six hats with small cybercodes on them. We planned ten activities to do in the primary school, we tested and recorded them before went, to work out the kinks and try to make the experience prototype the robustest we would. While we were mocking-up the situation of the classroom and doing those activities, we realised we had to give up using a DV cam as it didn't have mirror function... we imagined: up being down, down being up, left being right and right being left would be alittle bit to complicated In the end, we decided to go back to webcam. It wasn't too bad as we had our new cybercodes which camera tracks really well.




We were glad we made the journey to Cornwall as we had so many cubes and other stuff to carry. The plan was to do user testing in the primary school for two days,and we thought we were ready for it. However, the first day was really unfortunate....After we set up all the hardware and software before children arrived, we found out the lense of our webcam was ruined, it had been damaged in transit and half it it was blurry. We ended up spending half of the day getting into the town (chacwater is in the middle of the countryside) and trying to find a DV cam with mirror function, but in the end we still had to get a webcam as we couldn't find any DV cam with mirror function. We went back to the school quickly once we bought the webcam, but things still didn't go right...The camera wouldn't read and track cybercodes well, we spent the afternoon in the staff room trying to make BuildAR work again. Fortunately, at the end of the day, we found the vital solution to make the system work---we needed cybercodes mirrored as we set the webcam on mirror! We didn't discover it because our old cybercodes were nearly symmetrical. doh...



We tried to make this testing as real as possible to a commercial product, the camera and the bluetooth casses we created were used in the classroom. Medium cubes were lighter and smaller this time, we also added the large cube to try it out. One thing we thought could be a problem was the position of the large cube might be moved by the children. It was designed for teacher to move and flip it not for children, so we stick some black tape on the carpet to mark the position.




After we found the solution, we mirrored all of our cybercodes in the computer and the camera tracked them quite well. We ran our activities one by one in the class and it went ok. This time at school was more difficult to get children to play with it as they preferred to go out and enjoyed the sunshine in this sunny season. Those activities which were more successful were "Be careful", "Me and matching" and experiencing AR handheld console. "Be careful" was the activity that children had to hold a small cube well straight facing up and pass it to their classmates. Once they lost their balance and tilted it, the speakers in the class would say "Oh no!" Children enjoyed it a lot. In the "Me and matching" activity, six children had to wear the hats with cybercodes on them, children could see themselves on the screen as an animal. They had to go to the medium cube which matched the animal they were. It was fun for kids to see themselves as an animal on the screen. Children also loved AR handheld consoles, they were curious what they could see on every cybercodes of the cubes. This could lead to some exploring activities in lessons.










The other thing we found was in the "screen matching" activity,it was confusing for children to place the cubes in the correct position as forward was backward on the screen, the large cube was also always in the way when children were playing. We decided to get rid of the large cube and have buttons on the mat instead, which makes it easier both for teacher and children while playing and learning. This was a big desicion as all of our previous work was focused on it. This meant we had to go back and change things, meaning more work.

Cube prototype & Camera and cybercodes testing

After testing DV camera, we found it tracks cybercodes better than Webcam. It reads cybercodes when lighting isn't brilliant and also when cybercodes are being shaken.



Another thing we have been doing is making cubes light. Those cubes were built from 4mm MDF laser cut before, but they were still heavy for kids to move and shake. We decided to build a cube frame and have light surface on each side, the frame does look good but it's still not light enough (picture below). Pine was used to be the frame afterwards as it is much lighter then MDF, mounting boards are stapled on each side of a cube and a small box (Wiimote holder) made by laser cut machine is attached on a corner of the cube.



As the similarity of cybercodes was too high and the patterns of cybercodes couldn't be read stable enough by the camera when processing activities, we are testing out which kinds of pattern camera could read well. In order to know what kind of cybercode the camera can read well, we created different cybercodes to test. We found thicker lines patterns and leaving cybercodes square edges can be read by the camera easier.

After prototyping a user experience in Chasewater primary school, we started developing structure of cubes which can have Wiimotes added on.



After we got our hardware prototype, we did some interactivities testing by using Glovepie and Wiimotes which were positioned in cubes. The very first test we did was to make a cube speak 1 to 6 on each side, so when you flip the cube, each side tells you the number it is. Next testing, we shaked one cube to make others rumble, also cubes can educate children how to pronunce different letters and whether if they have correct spelling by fliping cubes and pressing buttons on large cube.








At this stage, we can only use BuildAR as our testing software, though it's not stable. Spelling letters is one of our interactivies for teachers to educate KS1 students through Ubiscape Cyber-dice. We tested this activities by using BuildAR combining Glovepie, but we found BuildAR augmented cybercodes incorrectly very often and we think the reason might be the cybercodes are too similar when camera reads them.






Another interactivity is to educate children the structure of a tree. As we found kids love stacking and shaking cubes, these two elements are integrated in this activity. The testing is still limited for us to do(such as shake to make apples fall from the tree), because we hardly have any knowledge of programming C++.

From last week, Mike and I have decided to work together for our final project.
We have got our basic structure of using AR in lessons for KS1 students in primary school.
We made some animations in 3D studio max and convert the files in .osg to import them into BuildAR.
Also, we did prototype some mock Cyberdice, and then did some testing trying to be as similar as a classroom format.





Our plan to test in Chasewater primary school for getting users' feedback and more depth of understanding of our project was on the 23rd and 24th of February.
Those days were really meaningful for us, also it was my first experience of teaching kids, I enjoyed a lot although it was tiring.

Some testing analysis we have discussed such as the sizes of Cyberdice and cybercodes need to be smaller, and they have to be strong enough for children to play with, it should be easy and simple for teachers to use...etc.

We have gained many useful feedback and insight from this primary research!

Dice Test

Today I am testing augmented reality on the dice which has 6 cybercodes on each side of it.

It seems more difficult for BuildAR to register the cybercodes on the dice as there are some similar cybercodes, also the camera isn't brilliant.

Sometimes when the environment isn't bright enough, it's difficult for the camera to read them.

The materials and colours of models can't still be programmed into BiuldAR, models would look much nicer with texture and colours.

The survey in the primary school where Mike's mum works is going on, it's a quick primary research about what cartoon characters age 8 to 10 children like, and what their favourite computer games are, in order to develop the interaction between children and the augmented reality game. The result should be gained after a week as the school needs to get permit from students' parents.

Learning from the book--Augmented Reality A Practical Guilde

Mike and I were gonna go to Cat Hill Lansdown Centre yesterday and today,
but the snow is still a lot outside.
The biggest snow in 18 years!
so we emailed some people for help and hopefully they can guilde us to a good direction.
Also we got a book today--Augmented Reality A Practical Guilde.
We got some information from the book,
the website http://www.artag.net/
it provide us a programme,Artag,which is similat to BuildAR that you can create your own models and programme them into this programme. The advantage of this programme is that you can programme in materials of the models,which makes your models look vivid. The book also tolds us that what kind of files we should create in order to match this programme. However,most information in this book we can't understand as it is about coding languages for the programme.