MYDL Curriculum--An example of rapid prototyping

Below are links to several iterations of our curriculum unit design. Each of these was developed and put into users' hands quickly, with subsequent iterations using feedback from the prototypes. As a general note, it's interesting how quickly we were able to see where improvements needed to be made

First pass:

http://www.umich.edu/~aaps/OLDoz

Note the huge amount of text here, compared to graphics. We quickly discovered that kids don't want to read this much text off of a computer screen.

Second attempt:

http://www.umich.edu/~aaps/disaster/dszt_wel.htm

More graphics in this one. Note the much smaller logo at the top of the page. Screen space is at a premium in the schools. It's easy to lose sight of that when working from the university.

Third generation:

http://www.umich.edu/~aaps/mygeology/

This version goes to an opening imagemap, rather than text. Our field observations of the prototypes told us this might work, and when we put this prototype in place, we found that students did make some use of it.

One drawback to this prototype was that it tried to do too much teaching. This seemed especially true of the help section.

Current thinking:

http://hi-c.eecs.umich.edu/umdl/mygeology/

If you visit this site, you'll see that we have made it more graphically oriented than some of the earlier generations. We've also made the site interactive, allowing student to share reviews of sites they find and look at what other students have said about Web sites.