Welcome to the thirtieth of Altitude Foundation’s #MicroChallenges2020
Today’s challenge will help you test out your idea by creating a digital prototype!
What’s a Micro Challenge?
These challenges are short activities to help you develop, revise or refresh your coding skills, posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Over the next few weeks, we are running a series of guest challenges, put together by our friend at Newcastle University Open Lab, Megan Venn-Wycherly. You can learn more about her work here and OpenLab here.
These challenges work as stand-alone challenges and also as a mini-course which builds together. The first in the series can be found here.
Micro Challenge #30
Today’s challenge is to create a prototype of a product or idea. If you need inspiration, try using the ideation squares challenge to explore your thoughts. You might also want to look at our prototype planning challenge.
In HCI, we use Wizard of Oz prototyping to show what looks like a finished project (most of the time!), but is really just “a man behind the curtain”. It helps us explore how people might interact with our prototype projects. You can make videos, pictures, models etc. which represent what your system might look like if it were finished, and how users are intended to interact with it.
Previously we have explored paper prototyping and 3D modeling.
The Challenge:
Today’s challenge is to use online and digital tools. There are various tools you can use – and remember, it is a prototype, the idea is to create a model of what it might look like, not the actual programme.
You might want to use one of these apps/simulators:
- An online prototyping and wireframing tools: https://marvelapp.com
- Wireframing allows you to plan the layout for an app or prototype, and consider what information you need to have at each point in the interaction
- An online simulator including: https://makecode.microbit.org or https://arcade.makecode.com
You might want to think about:
- How can you show the interactive elements of your design?
- Does its design help offer a solution to the problem you are exploring?
Review it:
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of modelling the prototype digitally?
Now you can start testing your prototype!
Advanced:
- Could you get a friend or family member to use your prototype? What can you learn from that?
- If you have completed all three prototyping challenges, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
- Share your ideas with Megan @Mwycher on Twitter for feedback and tips on how to take your challenge further.
Share it
We would love to see what you have created! Please send any pictures, videos, or files of your activities to us – either via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using #MicroChallenges2020 or to challenges@altitudefoundation.org. If you are emailing them to us, please let us know if you are happy for us to share your stuff on our social media platforms (with credit, of course).
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