Day 3

What to change
- Making the maze more sturdy
- Making the holes in the aim game bigger

Who is doing what
Isabela: Spinners
Claudia: Fishing game
Juanita: Aim game
Camila: Maze

What are else are we bringing
- Cardboard cutter
- Silicon
- Marbles or ping pong
- Magnets

Design Project Day 2

PROTOTYPE phase
1. Look at the drawings from each person in your group and discuss strengths and weaknesses of each.

Juanita, Camila and Me

• We did it pretty basic and didn't in depth with details so they pretty looked much the same.

Isabella

• She did it more detailed so it was easier to understand. She added more spinners to make it more fun and she did two different races for the users.

Best Model

• Isabella's.

Details From the Other Models

• Aim game.

Changes Needed

• Changing the type of aim game.

IDEATION PHASE

New Group

• Camila Villamil
• Juanita Ferrer
• Isabela Munoz 
• Claudia Beltran

User

• Primary boys and girls

Brainstorm

• Maze.
• Fishing Game.
• Aim Game.
• Spinner with dares.
• Game race between two players.

Our game is: Game race

Why is it fun

• There are many games.
• You can play with a friend.
• It's not too hard.
• Everyone who plays get a prize.

What could go wrong

• Kids cheating.
• Game wreck.
• Kids getting bored.

To avoid these

• Make the rules clear.
• Make it colorful.
• Make it with good support.

Design Project Day 1

Group

• Sofia Aldana
• Federico Abello
• Claudia Beltran

DEFINE PHASE

Users

• Primary boys and girls.

Difficulty

• Medium.

What Makes a Game Fun:

• Getting candy.
• Not too girly.
• Not too easy not too difficult.
• Flying things.
• Colorful.

RESEARCH PHASE

• Pinball Machine
• It really seemed entertaining and the little boy was amused but the two things you use to push the pinball up and avoid losing were too short.
• Caine's Labyrinth
• I really like how you didn't only have to get the little ball in one whole but there were also holes that made you lose making the game a bit more challenging. Maybe to make it even more fun for the users would be giving them a prize, even a small one if the person loses. There were many holes that made you lose so it was difficult.
• Fishing Game
• This was something different because all of the videos were about the same thing. Maybe adding more fishes or making it more colorful would make it more fun.

IDEATION PHASE

Ideas

• Pinball machine.
• Fishing game.
• Ticket Grab.

WE CHOSE: Ticket Grab

What Makes This Game Fun?

·         Little papers are flying around.

·         You get a prize at the end.

·         The prize you get depends on the color of the paper.

What Could Go Wrong?

• ·         The blower won’t work. 
• ·         The papers don’t fly.
• ·         The papers get out of the box.
• ·         The kids cheating.

To Avoid These…

• ·         Getting a stronger fan.
• ·         Arrange the direction of the blower.
• ·         Leave instructions for the kids to turn off the blower.
• ·         Giving the prizes the day we go there.

FINAL PRESENTATION

Tech Tool Evaluation

Tech Tools

• Evernote
• YouTube Quiz

Evernote

What I liked

1. You can save anything (texts, videos, pictures, audio)
2. You can have access to it from anywhere (computers, iPods, iPads, cellphones, tablets)
3. Keeps everything synced.

Drawbacks/What could be improved

1. Syncing without internet connection.
2. Limited space.
3. Problems with fonts.

How I could use it

1. Having all my notes in one place and ready for class.

YouTube Quiz


What I liked

1. Complements my videos by making them more interactive.
2. If I'm watching videos to study something it can help review.
3. Helps the audience catch the main ideas of the video.

Drawbacks/What could be improved

1. It doesn't show the one watching the video whether the answer was right or wrong.
2. Maybe adding more features to it  to make it more dynamic.
3. Finding another way to show it rather than annotations because the color isn't really nice.

How I could use it

1. Making my videos more interactive.

How Do Search Engines Work

What I know
 There are way to many search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Ask etc. and there are also themed search engines like for example some are related to medicine, business,etc.

What I want to learn

• How do they work?
• How do they gather information?

Links

• http://www.searchengineguide.com/gallianno-cosme/how-do-search-engines-work.php
• http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-internet-search-en
• http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may01/liddy.htm

What I learned

• Major elements of search engines: Crawlers/Spiders, Index & Software.

• Steps:
• Steps 1-3: Preprocessing 
• Step 4: Identify elements to index
• Step 5: Deleting stop words
• Step 6: Term Stemming
• Step 7: Extract index entries
• Step 8: Term weight assignment
• Step 9: Create index

• Crawlers read pages and follows the links on them.

• Crawlers: Googlebot (Google), Slurp (Yahoo!),  MSNBot (MSN Search)

• Crawlers go through all the webpages on the big index (database)

• Website owners can avoid having their websites being crawled daily by using a robot.txt.file.

• A software program called crawler is used to collect web pages. It retrieves extract words to be later stored with their corresponding website link in a index file.

• The users' inquiries are matched with the index file.

• To reduce search time, a data structured called tree is used. It duplicates the index list on computers in the search engine.

• Search engines use ranking methods like term-frequency-inverse document-frequency (TFIDF) to prioritize the results of a user's search.

• Another method is the link analysis, which is the Google uses. This method consists identifying if a webpage is an authority or a hub.

• To be able to hold billions of webpages and have access to them in matter of seconds, search engines construct data centers all over the world.

Summary

 I have to confess, I am a daily Google user. I have always found it amusing how fast search engines give us precise results, but I never really researched or ever wonder how complex their process is. It's nice to find out more about something you may use/see everyday without thinking it has a big story behind. 

Questions

1. Which is the best search engine?  (or is it Google I suppose?)