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5. Congratulation! It's now May 2011, and you just completed your freshman year. Please mark all your freshman classes as "completed" and enter the appropriate grades.
Observations and Revisions
(not separated by user)
Overall, we ran 7 users: 3 for the first iteration and 4 for the second iteration of the prototype.
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8) The difference between "completed" and "already received credit" was confusing.
Changes to Prototype
We did not change anything major in our design, but did some minor tweaking to make some things more clear.
1) We added an additional column to the schedule that represented "Classes with credit from AP classes or ASEs". This meant that if students had a course like 18.01 that htey passed out of, it had a reasonable place to go on the 4-year plan. (NOTE: The reason this is important in the long run, other than from an organization standpoint, is that our automatic scheduling algorithm will need to run a check on all requirements.)
2) We got rid of the "Already received credit" option and just added more options in the grade dropdown (i.e. P and S) These are automatically filled in if the class is dragged into the "AP Credit" semester.
3) We added an alert feature that has some explanations for why you can't do things. For example, when they tried to move 7.013 to the fall, it suggests that they take 7.012 instead since 7.013 isn't offered.
Final observations and thoughts
The changes we made eliminated most of the confusion that we had during the first iteration. The alerting for moving classes around that weren't offered during certain semesters seemed to be really helpful. One final thing that came up was that we do make a lot of assumptions about what students know, and we have to realize that incoming students wont' be familiar with a lot of MIT's numbering. For example, we should provide ways to access info about the majors (through links) and make sure that at least the number and title appear on all of the course boxes. Overall, however, our design and idea seemed very well received by our test subjects.