First Meeting

We had our first meeting with our clients on September 16. Our contacts at the Museum are Heather Paulsen and Madlyn Runberg, and they were very welcoming. We had a really good conversation with them where they clarified their vision for the project. I am still excited to work on this, and I see lots of possibilities for this site.

The project focuses, as we expected, on classification. Our client would like us to focus on an upper-elementary school audience; however, they mentioned that they would like any child to be able to come to the site and gain from it. The problem they are seeking to solve with this site is fact that they feel that students are not adequately learning the skill of classification. Heather goes to classes in Utah through their Outreach program, and she sees that children think they are classifying when they are actually just putting things into pre-determined groups The example she gave is that they will put all of the "lizards" together, but don't actually look at characteristics of lizards, so inevitably the (salamander? I don't remember what animal it was!) will end up in the lizards because the students think it is a lizard. Rather than placing artifacts according to where they think they should be, Heather and Madlyn would like to see students form a rule and then classify items according to that rule, and then do it again to form a two-tiered classification. They would then like the students to be able to defend their rule and test other items against it.

Our clients would like this site to be either a pre-activity for students who will be coming to them museum for a field trip, or else a stand-alone activity for students who cannot come to the museum.  This would be a way for students to interact with the artifacts from the museum in a way that they would be unable to in real life. They would like students to understand and build on the idea that they already know how to classify. They like "Scientist Sam" from the observation module, and mentioned that they would like to see a female scientist again on our site, and possibly a scientist that is closer in age to the students. I was unsure whether they meant that they wanted an older child, or if they just wanted a younger adult. I think we'll have to clarify that with our client. They also mentioned diversity (meaning a non-white scientist, I think).

As for prerequisite knowledge, Heather and Madlyn do not want us to assume that the audience will have any. They want any child, even non-english-speaking or disabled, to be able to have a good experience with this site. This can be incorporated in some small ways on our site, but we will be unable to provide full multi-lingual capabilities. We also discussed scaffolding, which will be good design and will also help with some of the accessibility and prerequisite knowledge issues. Our client also mentioned to keep in mind the broader vision: that this site will eventually be integrated within the museum's web site, and there will eventually be more modules. We don't need to go very deep, but focus on high quality and the ability to integrate classification with other skills.

The one thing that I was a bit unsure of at our meeting was what specific product Madlyn and Heather are expecting from us. Our team is prepared to fully develop this project into a website, but our clients seemed unsure if we would have the expertise needed to do so. This seemed to have something to do with a conversation they had with Dr. Zheng where they told him the scope of what they wanted, and he told them that they would need to hire a full-time team for a year to get that done. They are also aware that last years' team had specific skills in web design, and were worried about the access we would have to their design and templates. We told them that we are all trained in web design, and that we believe we can develop this into a fully-functioning site. We have since spoken with Dr. Zheng about this, and he has reassured us that we will have access to not only last year's site and templates, but that we will also be able to speak with one of the team members in order to help us design a similar site. I feel confident that we can produce a product that both our team and our clients will be happy with.