MoleculVR
The User:
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Late elementary through middle school (and maybe even high school) students
The Main Problem:
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Traditional teaching models assume that students will only listen to lectures or read books and that this is sufficient. Not only is this not very fun, but also, concepts like molecules and their properties are so abstract that they are difficult for young students to understand. Furthermore, children cannot explore molecular properties without risk of danger to themselves and others. How can students learn about chemistry in a more interactive way?
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Project Overview:
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Over the course of one weekend at MIT, my five-person team developed MoleculVR. I functioned as the product manager and one of two designers on the team. MoleculVR puts the player in a virtual lab with a 3D periodic table of elements. The player can reach into the periodic table, grab an atom, and put it into a "combination chamber" at their workbench. Students add molecules to the chamber one at a time, allowing them to explore possible combinations of elements. Once a student makes a combination of elements that is real-world molecule, the student is given visual feedback. The learning experience is discovery-based, allowing the student to try as many combinations as they desire. This is meant for a museum space setting, ideally increasing availability for low-income students whose schools cannot afford an HTC Vive. MoleculVR was ranked in the top 15% of projects created by hackathon participants from all over the world.
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The Process:
1. Friday Night: After our team was formed (and I learned what Unity was), I led a session in which we clarified the project vision, product features, and team member roles.
2. Saturday: I started the morning by using the HTC Vive for the first time. Then throughout the day, I immersed myself in creating 3-D assets​ for the first time, led extremely short team sprints, wireframed an interactive introductory tutorial, sketched out an ergonomic periodic table, learned how to optimize time with the engineers to allow them to complete their back-end coding, scoped and re-scoped many times, story-boarded the user's interactions within the environment (thinking about that objects were necessary and would also aid learning), communicated the design needs to the engineers, promptly reminded the team members when it was time to eat...and eventually went to sleep.
3. Sunday: I lead several more team check-ins and planning sessions, conducted testing sessions, worked with the engineers to identify and fix bugs, and continued to create 3-D assets. About an hour before the end of the hackathon, the code broke and the wifi stopped working. While the wifi was out, we re-prioritized the remaining features. Once the wifi came back on, we worked together to find an old version of the project (thanks to the beta of Unity Collaborate) and got it back to working condition under immense time pressure. Unfortunately, some of the UI was lost, but after hacking ended, we stayed and recreated some of the lost UI. (This is why the colors are different in the demo video and in the screenshots.)
Here are some wireframes that I quickly re-created Sunday night (since the originals were covering the glass windows of the 4th floor of the Media Lab...not the easiest things to take pictures of).
4. Monday: We were so proud of our project that we wanted to show it off at the public expo. This consisted of several hours of kids and adults exploring our MVP. We received wonderful feedback. Several kids returned to play with MoleculVR multiple times. (Check out the user interview in the demo video above!)
I was involved the the design of everything including the molecules (with accurate geometry), workbench area, periodic table, and clipboard (which will have a log of attempted element combinations in a future iteration). To check out other ideas that we didn't get to implement, check out our devpost from the hackathon.
