Team Emoti is back with some fresh off the press updates. Here we go! (pictures from visits upcoming)
We visited the Bay Area Children’s Association (BACA) today and spoke with their director, Dr. Tom Tarshis, who’s a trained psychiatrist. BACA is essentially a clinic for children with behavioral issues/mental disorders to come in and get treatment. One of the programs they use is called the “Minecraft social skills group” in which the computer game Minecraft is used to teach social skills to kids. Very relevant to our project, so we went and visited them! Here are some of the major insights we gathered: (notes from our visit can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ku1Fa3o6mYQxDWBO0P-uZVJBColp_-RMnpdeuCahi4w/edit)
Group work is key, and whatever we do is definitely going to require a multiplayer aspect. 1-on-1 coaching only works to a certain extent, and to have a true impact, we need to include the multiplayer aspect
We really need to think of how we’re going to measure whether our product is effective in teaching emotion. Dr. Tarshis recommended some industry practices, but clearly we need to think more about this.
Dr. Tarshis also gave us some recommendation regarding our ML classifier, and how we can make our classifier super generic to get high accuracy. He also gave us some suggestions on how we can better frame our rapid prototyping next.
We can cross apply some results from college students in regards to our product to kids
We really need the software to be instructional. At BACA they have trained therapists/psychiatrist go and teach kids social skills and techniques, but in schools it’s a complete wildgame. Therefore, our software definitely needs to think through and take this into account.
We also went into the Synapse School this morning and did some shadowing. We met with one of the SEL teachers, who showed us around and let us observe his classroom. We are planning a followup conversation with him to go over some stuff we had observed, but notes from our observations can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/157lSyFwn_LPUDcd-7vdURlyaGT-Z0lYA65KtoiE-V04/edit
Not sure if Emoti is really applicable for use with children. We still need to define the exact USE of our product, rather than focus on its technology. Why would kids want to use our product? Right now the use case still seems very unclear. To add on: it seems that Emoti doesn't fill an immediate need at Synapse - it may not be the right tool for an audience that already has years of SEL training under their belt. I think the bigger takeaway is that we need to observe a school that isn't SEL centric to get a better idea of how Emoti might help. Also, the shadowing really helped us understand how we can integrate the teacher-aspect to Emoti
We see why Robin emphasized empathy so much. Much of SEL curriculum seemed to revolve around the kids' ability to envision others' circumstances
Overall super impressed with the students - seemed very mature and 'self-aware' for their age. they had some awesome discussions that made us go 'awww'.
Anyways, Team Emoti is super jazzed and ready to take on more needfinding next week at AltSchool and Alpha Charter Schools!