This was a really productive meeting! We have spent a lot of time discussing the email, web, and ISP modules in abstractions, but we finally drew out each screen for the rest of the project. It's going to be short, but full of content. The ISP module will be similar in form to our ISP module, and email will also have a similar section. The e-mail module will be based around the idea of emailing AS220 to get on their mailing list, and the intro screen will be focused around this theme. The users will be asked to write email to AS220, and the screen will end with the question of "What happens when you click send?", followed by a send button.
Our two main demonstrations involve packets and routing. The students will be able to see a demo in which email breaks up into packets to travel through the wires of the Internet. Also, after a long debate over how the routing section should work, we decided to have a map of the country above two windows, each of which will show a different traceroute in a different color. The user can click on color-coded boxes next to the map of the country and see two different ways a set of packets traveled over the Internet going from one side of the country to another. When the user first clicks the purple box, for example, she will see a purple line travel from Providence through several cities on the way to California. As the line travels through each city, the appropriate line of that traceroute will appear in the appropriate box below the map.
We struggled for a while over where to put the routing and packet demos: should they appear in the email module? Or link off email and the web? We finally decided to link them off the Internet module. This way, the user can see them when she first sees the words router and packet, or can go back and see them at any time.
We have departed slightly from our original timeline. As we progress, we're realizing that our original means of organizing deadlines was not efficient. It doesn't make much sense to do each module discretely. Rather, it makes more sense for our graphic designer to do all of the graphics together in chunks when she can, for the scripter to do as much as possible at any time, for the writer to write several sets of text at a time. This way, if one thing is not finished on time, the others will still] have work to do.