Q: Will you tell me about your project?
A: Basically, we’re making training digital training simulators for teachers that help them practice classroom management skills using applications on a website or virtual reality headsets depending on what they have access to technology-wise.
Q: How would this be helpful for teachers? What would it look like in practice?
A: Currently, when teachers want to practice skills for the classroom, they have to either go to big meetings, county or district training sessions in person, which obviously with the pandemic is hard to do. This would let them do practice modules in five or ten-minute increments whenever they wanted to – they could just pull up an application or put on a Virtual Reality headset and do trainings whenever.
Q: When did you start working on this?
A: It’s a Senior Capstone Project that was in development a year and a half ago with another group. Our group inherited it when school started in the fall and we’ve been working on it ever since.
Q: What are your roles in your group?
A: There’s four of us – there’s me, Riley, Daniel and Amy, our business student. I do the research and some user interface stuff – designing how the app looks and some of the icons and whatnot. Riley is our presenter, so she does a lot of the writing for the simulators and makes all our videos. It’s a small team, but we do a lot of work. We’re competing in seven different business competitions this semester and we competed in two last semester.
Q: What does competing look like?
A: There are a bunch of business competitions across the U.S. that host pitch and business plan startup competitions. You put in a proposal and see if you get accepted, and if you do you present to a panel of judges and get feedback on your presentation. You can potentially get money and investors to continue building the idea – last year we competed at the University of Idaho business pitch competition and won $1,000, so we’ve been using that to continue to develop the product.
Q: How time consuming is this for you?
A: Last week I spent 28 hours outside of class time for this project, but last week was really busy because we were submitting to the Rice Business Plan Competition, so that’s the hardest it’s been in a while.
Q: Has it been rewarding for you?
A: I think seeing the idea take shape and look cool in the end is rewarding in its own way, but also seeing your design choices play out over the span of eight months. It’s also cool seeing everyone in the group put out really good work. It’s been rewarding on an interpersonal level too.
Q: Have you gotten close with your team?
A: Oh, yes. We play Among Us and we’ve been busy this last week but we try to do socials sometimes. We usually have meetings at least four times a week and we have a big Snapchat group chat.
Q: Has it been empowering for you?
A: Winning a business competition was empowering but seeing design choices play out over eight months has probably been the most impactful thing. In our degree, we usually do projects for a couple weeks or months, but we haven’t really had a long-term project that plays out over an entire school year before. Seeing how far a project can go in that span has been really interesting.