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.
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