CIRCA:Samila

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Samila Writes a Review

Persona: Samila is an undergraduate in English who hears about the Writing Game in a course. She is computer literate and an active user of social media including Twitter and Facebook. She likes the idea of a writing environment with social features. She tends to carefully read documentation and prides herself on her technical writing.


Scenario 1: Writing a two page book review

  1. She decides to try using it for a minor assignment in an English course where she has to write a book review. The review isn't supposed to go over 2 pages so it strikes her as a perfect task to try out The Writing Game.
  2. She goes to the site and checks the About the Writing Game to make sure that this tool can be used for this assignment.
  3. She gets an account, and selects the checkbox to get email updates information about the project. She is interested in how this is a research project.
  4. Once in her account she is prompted to create a project. One of the choices is to Create a Simple Project, which she chooses.
  5. The system prompts her to fill out the basic information about the project. She is asked to give it a name, to decide how she wants completion to be evaluated, to enter a description of the project, and to decide if she wants to be challenged (or challenge others.)
  6. She chooses to have the system challenge her with an email prompt every day since the review is due in a week. She provides a due date for the project and an anticipated number of words (500).
  7. She fills in a couple of Milestones including Read the Book, Write a description, Write an Introduction, and Write a Reaction.
  8. The next day she gets the first prompt to Read the Book.
  9. Three days later while reading the book it occurs to her that it would be nice to write notes right into The Writing Game. She thinks of creating a separate project for her notes, but ends up just creating a new Milestone called Take Notes. She writes her notes and quotes there. She clicks Done and the system prompts her for a comment on what she has done.
  10. She writes a short brag and decides to see what the Send to Twitter button does. To get this to work she has to provide her Twitter account and password. Once she does that the system posts a Tweet to the effect that she has taken notes.
  11. Now it is time to write the review. She clicks done on Read the Book and Take Notes just for the satisfaction and checks her email. There is nice email congratulating her on getting two Milestones done. Now there are just three more Milestones.
  12. She starts the introduction with a standard line introducing the author and title of the book read. Just to see how it works she then clicks the Evaluate Completion and slides the slider across a bit.
  13. Now she starts seriously writing a description of the book. She realizes she really should have her notes right there so she copies and pastes them into the text, arranges them in the order she wants, and starts writing out the description.
  14. On the fifth day she gets an email telling her she has two days left and documenting how many words she has. She has over 500 words, but hasn't really finished the introduction or any other parts. She gets down to finishing the description and clicks Done for that.
  15. Then she starts in on her reaction to the work. She is stuck for how to do that so she clicks on the Writing Tips until she gets a relevant tip and clicks the button for More about Writing Book Reviews. That takes her to a wiki page with links to recommended sites. She wanders around the web until she finds an example she likes. Inspired she writes a couple paragraphs that can conclude the review and clicks Done. Now all she has to do is write the introduction.
  16. She returns to the introduction and following advice she found, she a few sentences what the book is about and who it is for.
  17. She clicks Done now on Write an Introduction and TWG rewards her with a lovely Project Done dialog box and gives her the option to write a closing comment about the project and post it to Twitter. She writes "Finished my review in The Writing Game, now for some sleep."
  18. The next day, prompted by an email, she exports the project to Word, prints it, proofs it, corrects it in Word and prints it again - its ready to hand in later that day.
  19. Using TWG has given her ideas. She clicks Suggestions? and suggests that there be a Facebook connection that can post to her wall. She also has suggestions for the Writing Tips that she sends in.
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