PETS:
A Personal Electronic Teller of Stories

The Software Group

We were the group in our intergenerational design team that worked on making the software so that kids could tell stories with our PETS. We started by looking at some of the software that our adult partners had made. We decided what we liked and what needed work. Then we did a lot of brainstorming. We talked about what feelings we wanted to give our robots and what actions they would have to do to show those feelings. We tested out some of our ideas on people and then we made a final decision on what feelings we would have our robot do. Finally, we designed the software screens so that kids could tell stories using the robot. Below are some pictures that show what we did:

 

This shows how we brainstormed all the feelings we wanted the robot to show.

 

After we picked out 7 feelings we wanted to do, we thought about how the robot might do them. We made a list of the actions that would show each feeling. Then we did a usability test to see if people could guess these feelings when we acted like the robot. On the left is what we did to test our ideas. And on the right is one of the software developers being the robot, showing "happy" actions.

 

These were some of the screens we drew for our software. We scanned each one in and then made our prototype software.

 

Here one of our software developers is demoing our prototype.

 

 

In Summary...

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what our robot would do. We didn't get to drawing what our software would look like until almost a week after we started. We found out that it was important to test our ideas before we programmed them. When we acted like the robot, people helped us refine our robot actions and emotions. For the future, we have a lot more work to do on our software.

PETS Project Page ----Skeleton Group Page ---- Skins and Sensors Group Page