Final Progress Report

Well, it’s been a long semester, but I truly enjoyed producing this project.  Here is my final presentation, summing up my experience.

I Can Read! Final Presentation

Thank you for your interest in reading my blog.

Best wishes,

Elizabeth

Progress Report, Week Fifteen

This last week I created my final project iteration.  I had received some additional feedback from classmates concerning the Alphabet Series of flashcards.  I added color to the outside edges and matched the letter color to the border.  In addition, I added a stroke around the words in the Animals series to enhance the clarity of the words against the images.

View the final project: Alphabet and Animals

I am glad to have had the opportunity to work on this project and produce something that my daughter will be able to use.  This week I will be creating a presentation outlining the progression of my project throughout the semester.

Progress Report, Week Fourteen

This week I worked on another draft to post for review and critique by my classmates.  The biggest change I made to the project this week was to update the images in the Alphabet series so that they would be more easily recognizable by young children.  There were a few images that my test audience mentioned I should change.  I also decided to use only illustrations in the Alphabet series.  Previously, the images were a mixture of illustrations and photos.

Here’s a comparison of the Yy flashcard:

Yy - Version 1

Yy - Version 2

I’ve received some feedback on this iteration of my flashcards.  I think the Animals cards can be considered complete.  I may change a few images still in the Alphabet series based on my feedback.

Next week I’m looking forward to creating a final draft and working on a presentation of the life of the project from start to finish.

 

 

 

 

Progress Report, Week Thirteen

This week I was given an opportunity to post a problem I have been having with my project so that I could receive advice from my professor and fellow classmates.  My main problem is time.  I’m very happy with how well the flashcard project has been going so far, but one thing I’d mentioned I wanted to include was a book that went along with the flashcards.  However, I have not had a chance to start on the book.  I went through the Lynda.com tutorials that I think taught me what I need to know to be able to create the book.  But my problem is getting time to do it.  My main concern was that flashcards weren’t “enough”.  I was worried I hadn’t satisfied the project requirements.

It turns out I’m not the only one with time problems.  Most of my classmates expressed their frustration with not having enough time to do what they want to do with their projects.  This brought up several interesting points: what is college about really?  Is it just to get a piece of paper?  Or is it something more?  Can you learn as much about yourself in college as you can about the subject you study?  Why do we create these insane schedules for ourselves and stress out for four months of not having enough time?

All good questions.  I don’t know that anyone in class has the answers.  But I feel that I at least am working on answering at least a few for myself.

But on a more practical note: my project is just fine.  I did extra research at the beginning that should definitely be included in part of my final presentation.  I’ve decided that while I would have liked to include a book, I can always continue with the project at a later date…when I have more time.

This week I’m looking toward finishing up with the flashcards and making my final iteration.  I will also be working on a final presentation of the life of the  project and how I got to the end result.

Progress Report, Week Twelve

The last two weeks I have been focused on studying the readability and usability of my flashcard project.  The goal was to “test” the project on representative members of the primary and secondary audiences.  My initial challenge was determining which people to ask to test my project.  Though my daughter is my primary audience, I don’t know very many other families with children her age.  In the end I tried the flashcards on a couple children a little older than my daughter in addition to having her try them.  Those three children, aged between 1-6 years old represented my primary audience.  At the onset of the project I determined the secondary audience would be made of myself and my husband, my daughter’s babysitter, grandparents–basically anyone that might go through the flashcards with her.  To represent this audience, I asked my husband, my dad, and two neighbors that have small children, to test the flashcards.

The testing was a success.  I asked each of the adult test subjects to answer the same five questions intended to determine how clear the flashcards were to read, how interesting or engaging they were, if they were an appropriate size, and if this is something the subjects would use with their children.  I aslo asked for any other comments.  I learned some interesting things about my project.  First, I am pleased to report that the flashcards are very clear to read.  I’m especially pleased because I focused a lot of time on ensuring the font was appropriate and that the words (especially in the animals series) were legible on top of the photos.  Second, almost everyone mentioned the cards should be bigger.  I had even printed on larger paper than I originally intended, so this was a surprising result.  However, it is easy enough to set-up printing to make bigger images.  When I printed on larger paper, the upscaling did not affect image or text quality.  I’m confident that this change can be resolved through print settings and does not require any changes to my project.  Finally, one fact I learned that I had not considered was that some of the images were taken at such an angle or were unusual enough that they might be unrecognizable to small children.  For example, this image of a yo-yo. 

Though I hadn’t considered this when originally selecting images, it seems like it should have been obvious.  So one thing that I will change is some of the images I selected.

Looking ahead to next week, I will be contimplating and posting any problems I am having with the project for group discussion.  I believe the biggest problem I’m having is that I don’t have enough time to make more flashcards and create a short book.  I have a great desire to make the book, but doubt that I will be able to do it justice in the short time that is left.  At the same time, I wonder if I’ve done enough to satisfy the requirements of the project.  This is something that I will post to the discussion board for the class.  My professor and classmates should provide excellent feedback and advice.

Progress Report, Week Eleven

There was not much in the way of progress to report this week.  The goal for this week and next is to test a draft of the project on the primary and secondary audiences to determine its readbility and usability.  This week I spent trying to determine who to ask to review the project.  I know I will show it to my daughter, but don’t expect a lot of feedback from a 1-year old.  I will also be showing it to my husband, father, and mother.  They are all members of the secondary audience and will be able to give good feedback on how useful and readable the flashcards are.  I want my dad to review it specifically because he is red-green colorblind.  I am going to talk to a friend that has a two-year old to see if she and her son will take a look to round out the primary and secondary audience test subjects.

It will be difficult getting any exact feedback from the primary audience.  They don’t necessarily understand what I’m looking to find out or even what the point of the flashcards are.  My daughter can’t even talk yet.  So my goal in testing the cards on the two children will be to note their reactions to and interest in the flashcards.

I’ll have a final readability/usability report ready for next week’s posting.

Progress Report, Week Ten

Over this last week I gathered the editorial review feedback I received and made some decisions on how I would or would not apply the feedback in my project.  In summary:

• Layout – it was recommended that I look at layout for some of the Animals flashcards.  I have since reworked some of the layouts to try to increase legibility.
• Colors – some of the flashcards in the Animals series were harder to read, because of the color choice for the words.  I have gone through and adjusted the tone of some of the words to increase legibility.
• Interest – my reviewer mentioned that the Alphabet series of flashcards was nice, but might not attract the interest of a toddler.  She suggested incorporating pictures.  I have now done so.  I actually am not sure that I like the result.  I think I’m going to have to work on how to better add visual interest to these cards.

See the updated versions here: Animals and Alphabet

I learned about Swatches and creating new colors this week, which is where I was lacking when I made the original version of the flashcards.  I think learning about this (which was buried deep down in the Lynda.com tutorial) has helped a lot to increase readability.  My major concern this week was adding the images to the Alphabet series.  I really like the original series.  There were no negative comments about the series, just that it seemed like it would help a 5-year old better than a toddler.  I guess that’s a big problem since my primary audience is a toddler.  I’m still not happy with the images that I chose, though I really like the illustrations better than photos.  I may try to find more illustrations to replace the photos and see if that works out better.  I may also adjust the colors of the letters in the cards to match the illustrations I use.

This coming week will be dedicated to a readability/usability analysis.  I’m also going to attempt to lay out a short book if time permits.

Progress Report, Week Nine

This week everyone in class had to prepare an Editorial Review version of our projects so far.  These versions were then reviewed by fellow classmates and constructive feedback was given.  For my editorial review, I completed two different sets of flashcards, one set of the Alphabet and one of Animals.  In creating the Alphabet flashcards I learned all about the “Type on a Path” feature of InDesign.  It was actually a little challenging to try to make the text follow around the outside of a rectangle.  But I feel that using the tool was probably much easier than trying to accomplish the same task manually.  The Animals flashcards taught me a lot about color selection and text and image placement.

I received some very helpful feedback from one of my classmates.  She said that some of the words in the animal series were hard to read because the color did not stand out enough.  Her favorite of the animals was Frog and Horse because of the use of white space and the layout of the image and text.  I may try to change the layout of some of the other cards to be more like Frog or Horse.  My classmate’s other suggestion concerned the Alphabet cards.  She suggested including an image with each of the cards, for example the letter A and an image of an apple, or B and a balloon, etc.  Her feedback is based on having two children of her own and having spent time developing a pre-school curriculum for them.  I agree that my daughter would be more drawn to the cards if they included more color.  I may try a few with some simple images, maybe even hand-drawn images and see how they look.

Next week is spring break, so week nine actually begins on the 22nd.  Look for another post in two weeks.  I look forward to learning more about InDesign in the next weeks, improving my flashcards, and creating a few more sets of cards with topics like food, travel, and numbers.

Progress Report, Week Eight

This week the entire class took a break from working on projects to discuss United States Copyright Law.  One of my goals from last week was to learn more about copyright and how it relates to my project and the images I’m using.  I determined that my project falls under the category of “Fair Use”.  It’s an educational project in two ways: 1) I’m creating the project for a college course, 2) the project itself will be used to teach.  The images I’ve collected so far came from Wikimedia Commons.  All of these images are actually designed to be used by anyone.  They have a broad license.  As I don’t intend to sell my project or use it for commecial gain, I feel that I can freely use the images I’ve chosen.  However, I think to cover all my bases, I will include a card with each group of flashcards that list the links to all the images I use.

Challenges this week…my biggest challenge this week was time and not having enough of it.  I had a pretty packed schedule this week.  So this afternoon when I finally got a chance to sit down and make more flashcards, I ended up losing connection to the ASU server and lost my work.  It was frustrating.  Instead of getting angry, I decided that someone just didn’t want me to make flashcards this week.  So my goal for next week is to make more flashcards.  Also I would like to continue with the Lynda.com tutorials and focus on the skills that I’ll need to create a book later.

Progress Report, Week Seven

This week’s goal was to decide on a font and to try to incorporate images and color in several sample flashcards.  I believe I was able to accomplish this goal.  Check out Iteration1.  I discarded all the previous fonts I had sampled and decided on Century Gothic.  I came to this decision after a Google search on flashcard fonts.  A teacher left a comment on one page stating that they always use Century Gothic for all their flashcards.  After I tried it, I knew I had found my font!  Century Gothic is made up of very simple letter shapes.  I like this aspect because I feel a natural transition from learning to read would be learning to write.  And Century Gothic could easily be traced by a child learning to write.  The single-level letters (a and g, for example) also make Century Gothic much simpler for a child transitioning to writing.

The images were the most challenging part of my work this week.  First, after I found images on Wikimedia Commons, I had to carefully read through the copywrite information to determine if I could use the image without having to cite every source on every flashcard.  I chose two that had the loosest specifications, but I’m still not sure if I am using them properly according to the copywrite.  I look forward to this coming week of class where we will be discussing copywrite law.  I hope to get some answers as to what considerations I need to make when creating these flashcards.  Second, I am not sure if I really like the first flashcard in the Iteration.  I had to adjust the transparency of the image in order to make the word stand out well enough.  I’m not sure if I like the second flashcard either because it feels unbalanced to me.  I had intended to center the word on all the flashcards, but I think now that I may end up moving the word in relation to the image I choose for each individual card.  This seems like extra work, but I think the end product will be nicer.

As I said previously, next week I look forward to learning more about copywrite law.  I also intend to create several sets of flashcards covering multiple topics.  I hope to be done with the flashcards soon because I have definitely decided that I would like to create a simple book to accompany the different sets of cards.  This will require more in depth study of the Lynda.com tutorials and will take more work to plan, write, and design than the flashcards have so far.