This year built on many of the trends that were established previously. On top of continuing to polish the user experience of the platform, we had the opportunity to conduct user testing on the high school demographic and saw a pivot in the ethos of the core product. 

We had the opportunity to conduct feasibility testing at two major events, the first a high school hackathon, then at a summer program. The hackathon had a tight time constraint, limited to just 30 min sessions, just enough to demo the platform’s tutorials and fine tune them for the summer program.

The summer program offered eight hours of instruction over 2 days to onboard students and create projects. Additionally, we utilized a pair programming paradigm to limit learners’ time in VR. This approach afforded students enough time to gain enough familiarity with the platform to build their own projects. Some highlights include a bowling game, archery, and a moonscape. 

To wrap up the year, we also started to move towards changing our core theme from an embodied coding platform, to more of an immersive creative coding platform. The key difference is that instead of focusing on the gestures, we focus more on the creation and physics engine. More details on where we plan to go with this will be discussed in future posts.