An AR-based educational experience complementary to an aviation exhibit, designed to expose school students to aviation history and careers through a multi-stage activity.
ROLES
UX Designer (special focus on playtesting)
Co-Producer (project management)
YEAR
2022
ARviation was created by a team of five students to fulfill the semester project requirement at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology graduate degree. It was created for MuseumLab, from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and Hosanna House.
Project Overview
The outcome of project ARviation is a 20-30 minutes experience, designed for elementary school groups visiting the museum exhibit at the Center for Aviation Technology and Training (Wilkinsburg, PA). The activity requires a tablet with the project's app (titled BAM! Build a Mustang), a deck of puzzle cards, an airplane diagram, and a Morse Code guide (all of which were designed and created specifically for this activity).
The experience starts when students run the app and are introduced to Charlie, an African-American teenager who inherited a P-51 Mustang from a Tuskegee Airman. Charlie needs their help to restore the airplane before she can fly it, framing the students as a group of aviation experts (engineers and mechanics).
The first stage of the activity requires students to sort cards into an airplane diagram, using a variety of categories and colors. The second stage asks them to play a puzzle game with these cards, in which they must define the right components necessary to rebuild the P-51 Mustang based on physics, engineering, and history facts. The third stage lets them "hunt" for these components hidden around the exhibit space, in augmented reality (AR) and using the Morse Code guide to solve puzzle codes. The fourth stage allows students to assemble the virtual airplane pieces in the app, and the fifth and final stage allows students to fly the airplane in AR.
Documentation and media about ARviation were recorded in the project's website, which includes detailed information about the following:
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Goal
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Client(s)
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Team members and instructors
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Videos and photographs
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Media materials (logo, poster, etc.)
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Process blog (weekly documentation of progress and project post-mortem)
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Mention in local news
Roles
My defined roles in the team were UX designer and co-producer (project management).
As UX designer, I coordinated and led playtesting (user testing) sessions and analyzed their results. For these sessions, I created prototypes of project features that were later polished by my teammates. I was also in charge of designing the puzzle stages and researching and crafting the experience's written content and narrative elements.
As co-producer, I coordinated the team's work and task-tracking, organized working materials and documentation, maintaned the project's website, and communicated with faculty, clients, and collaborators in representation of the team, among others.
