09 Microsoft Presentation

For the last few weeks, we centered our efforts and energies towards our presentation at Microsoft. We took everything we had done so far and refined it to a clear need, a well-defined user and of course our solution. We had a chance to practice in advance in front of our mentors and classmates and based on their notes we improved our presentation up to the point we felt it was ready for Microsoft.

The big day has arrived! We were nervous and excited to present everything we've accomplished so far but mostly to see the reacts and hear the feedback from the experts who are meeting our product for the first time.

We were the second group to present, and of course, something has to go wrong so unfortunately, our demo didn't work during our presentation but as they say 'Show must go on' so we just explained the technology without showing it lively. Other than that we felt good about our performance.

Experts and mentors wise we received contradict feedbacks. There was one mentor who felt strongly about our product that not only it will not solve the problem it's going to increase it by shifting the focus of the students from the lecture to another source of stimulation that is not helpful rather disturbing to the teacher. Although criticism is part of the game, it was hard hearing someone from outside who knows nothing about our work and process 'killing' it just like this. Also, we felt he didn't give us an alternative solution- It's ok to have bad criticism, but if we can't learn and improve from it it's not helpful. On the other hand, there were other mentors that 'stood up' for us and said that they believe our idea is good and has the potential to create a new form of learning. They suggested we'll use A/B testing to understand better if and how much does it interrupts. They also thought we should offer a transcript at the end of the lesson or a list of all the terms from the lesson- an idea we thought about ourselves but decided it's not MVP in this point.

Overall it was a positive experience, and we're proud and happy about our progress. Our main tasks towards the next semester will be to start working on the design, continue to build the technological infrastructure and of course, our primary challenge conduct user testing which seems to be quite a task since it requires more then mockup something we're far from achieving at this point. We'll have to get creative and figure out how to test the product without a working app and how to produce insight that will help us continually develop our product!