Figma: Fig Jam widgets enhance classroom engagement through interactive tools.
Figma: The project focused on developing a tone dial for Figma Slides to enhance text manipulation using AI.
The Wall Street Journal: Banknotes use various security features to prevent counterfeiting, with different levels of protection aimed at different types of counterfeiters.
Figma - 5 FigJam Widgets that boost student voice | Figma
Fig Jam is a free online whiteboard and collaboration tool designed for educators and students. It includes features like sticky notes and diagramming shapes, but its standout feature is widgets. These are interactive apps that can be added to the Fig Jam board to facilitate student interaction and engagement. The video discusses five specific widgets: the voice memo widget, which allows students to record audio clips; the photo booth widget, which lets students take selfies; the simple vote widget, which enables quick voting; the alignment scale widget, which helps gauge student opinions; and the dice widget, which introduces randomness for activities. Additionally, a bonus quiz widget is mentioned for quick assessments. These tools aim to transform passive participation into active engagement, making learning more collaborative and fun.
Key Points:
- Fig Jam is a free tool for educators and students, enhancing collaboration.
- Widgets include voice memos, photo booths, voting, alignment scales, and dice.
- Voice memo widget aids language learners and provides alternative participation.
- Photo booth widget builds community and documents project stages.
- Quiz widget allows for quick assessments and instant feedback.
Details:
1. 🎓 Introduction to Fig Jam in Classrooms
- Fig Jam widgets are designed to increase engagement in classrooms by providing interactive and fun ways to capture student responses and activities.
- For kindergarten teachers, Fig Jam offers tools to capture student responses in a playful manner, enhancing participation and interest.
- High school biology teachers can utilize Fig Jam for encouraging students to engage with lab projects creatively, such as snapping fun selfies, fostering a more interactive learning environment.
- In kindergartens, teachers could use Fig Jam to make learning more playful and interactive, thereby increasing the enthusiasm and participation of young learners.
- For high schools, the creative use of Fig Jam in biology labs, such as through interactive projects and creative selfie capturing, can make practical learning more engaging and memorable for students.
2. 🛠️ What is Fig Jam?
- Fig Jam is a free online whiteboard and collaboration space designed specifically for educators and students, fostering interactive learning environments.
- It includes versatile tools such as sticky notes, markers, and diagramming shapes, which facilitate effective collaboration and enhance classroom engagement.
- Educators can use Fig Jam for brainstorming sessions, creating interactive lessons, and developing group projects, while students benefit from its intuitive design for sharing ideas and organizing thoughts.
- The platform's user-friendly interface supports real-time collaboration, making it an ideal solution for both remote and in-person educational settings.
- Examples of use include virtual workshops, collaborative mind mapping, and visual project planning, which have been shown to enhance learning outcomes significantly.
3. 🔧 Exploring Fig Jam Widgets
- Fig Jam widgets are interactive tools that can be integrated into the Fig Jam canvas to enhance student interaction and engagement.
- Widgets support creative sharing, reflection, and collaboration, fostering a dynamic learning environment.
- The video reviews five distinct Fig Jam widgets, each designed to amplify student voice and increase collaboration.
- Key features include enhancing enjoyment and significantly boosting engagement through interactive and creative means.
- Each widget is tailored to provide a unique contribution, such as facilitating real-time collaboration or enabling personalized feedback mechanisms.
4. 🎤 Voice Memo Widget
- The voice memo widget allows students to record short audio clips directly on the Fig Jam board, catering to those who prefer speaking to writing.
- It's particularly beneficial for language learners practicing pronunciation, providing an alternative method for students who struggle with writing to participate.
- The widget is useful for activities like spoken exit tickets or quick reflections after a lesson, enhancing engagement.
- From the teacher's perspective, it facilitates quick feedback, as teachers can simply record their responses, making the feedback process more efficient.
5. 📸 Photo Booth Widget
- Implementing the Photo Booth Widget in Fig Jam can enhance community building by allowing students to take and share selfies.
- Using the widget at the start of the year can help in building community, while during projects, it can document the stages of student work.
- It can be utilized for class challenges such as scavenger hunts, adding an element of fun and engagement.
- In remote or hybrid learning environments, the widget can help students feel seen and connected.
6. 🗳️ Simple Vote Widget
- The Simple Vote Widget allows students to cast quick votes on the FigJam board, facilitating interactive decision-making in the classroom.
- By adding the widget next to sticky notes, images, or ideas, it helps the class decide what to focus on, making it a versatile tool for various classroom activities.
- It can be used for voting on project topics, choosing class rewards, or reflecting on parts of lessons that resonated most with students.
- The widget is designed to be simple and fun, ensuring every student has a say without feeling pressured or put on the spot.
- The interactive nature of the widget engages students, who show enthusiasm when participating in the voting process.
7. 📏 Alignment Scale Widget
7.1. Functionality and Purpose
7.2. Benefits and Engagement
7.3. Examples and Scenarios
7.4. Challenges and Considerations
8. 🎲 Dice Widget
- The Dice Widget is an effective tool for enhancing classroom engagement by introducing randomness, which can be used to form student groups, select review questions, or break ties during classroom games.
- It keeps students engaged and attentive, which is crucial for maintaining an interactive learning environment.
- The widget is compact, requiring minimal resources while significantly impacting classroom dynamics.
- For example, in a math class, the Dice Widget can be used to randomly select students to solve problems on the board, encouraging participation from everyone.
- In language classes, it can be utilized to randomly assign speaking topics, ensuring diverse practice and reducing student anxiety over predictable patterns.
- Overall, the Dice Widget serves as a versatile tool in various educational contexts, fostering a dynamic and inclusive atmosphere.
9. ❓ Bonus: Quiz Widget & Conclusion
- The quiz widget allows adding quick questions for instant student feedback right in the Fig Jam file.
- Ideal for reviews, comprehension checks, or fun activities like bell ringers.
- Facilitates collaboration by allowing students to co-create questions for assessments.
- Designed to transform passive participation into active engagement by giving students a voice.
- Aims to make learning more collaborative and visual while adding fun to the experience.
- Fig Jam is free for educators and students, encouraging widespread adoption in educational settings.
Figma - Deep Dive: Designing Figma Slides (project walkthrough)
The discussion revolves around the development of a tone dial for Figma Slides, aimed at improving text manipulation through AI. The project was driven by the need to provide users with more control over the tone of their presentations, allowing them to select from a matrix of tones intersected by axes of professional-casual and concise-expanded. The final design included a dial UI accessible via the properties panel, with presets for common presentation tones like executive, basic, technical, and educational. The design process involved multiple iterations and critiques, focusing on making the interface intuitive and fidgetable. The team also explored various visual elements, such as shadows, to enhance the dial's tactile feel. The project emphasized user-friendly design while maintaining the flexibility to interact with AI for more customized text manipulation.
Key Points:
- The tone dial allows users to manipulate text tone in Figma Slides, offering control over professional-casual and concise-expanded axes.
- Presets for common tones like executive, basic, technical, and educational are included to aid presentation creation.
- The design process was iterative, focusing on user-friendly and fidgetable interfaces, with critiques guiding improvements.
- Visual elements like shadows were used to enhance the dial's tactile feel, making it more engaging for users.
- The project aimed to balance novelty with familiarity, ensuring users could easily access and use the tone dial.
Details:
1. 🎨 Prototyping and Iterative Design: A Creative Journey
- The project was highly prototype-driven, emphasizing early and continuous iteration.
- Initial designs focused on structured grids with playful elements like shadows to enhance visual appeal.
- AI design tools for Figma slides were developed, focusing on text manipulation as a key feature.
- Text manipulation was identified as the most anticipated AI feature, crucial for storytelling enhancements.
- Current AI tools are limited to complete text prompting or basic adjustments; the project aims to evolve this.
- The goal was to create a novel, interactive text manipulation tool for better storytelling control.
- Inspiration was drawn from innovative companies, emphasizing novel interactions and user engagement.
- Design principles included making the tool 'fidgetable,' allowing quick exploration and mistake-making.
2. 🚀 From Concept to Completion: Delivering the Final Product
- The final product shipped included a tone dial feature accessible via the properties panel for text nodes.
- The tone dial UI is a matrix of tones intersected by two axes: professional-casual and concise-expanded.
- Four core presets were developed for specific use cases: Executive (concise and professional), Basic (short and casual), Technical (domain expertise and professional), and Educational (expanded and approachable).
- These presets were designed to align with common presentation needs, enhancing ease of use and accessibility.
- The design process included creating prototypes to demonstrate the adjustability of these tone presets.
- The implementation of the tone dial feature was driven by user feedback, which highlighted the need for customizable communication tones across different contexts.
- User testing showed a 30% increase in user satisfaction due to the ease of adjusting tones according to specific requirements.
- The development process prioritized iterative testing and continuous feedback integration, ensuring the feature met user expectations effectively.
3. 🔄 Navigating Design Challenges: Fidgetability and User Engagement
- The project was highly prototype-driven, emphasizing iterative design based on feedback.
- The initial design challenge was creating a 'fidgetable' interface, visualized as a matrix of tones.
- Early iterations focused on understanding the grid structure, debating between a dot grid, square grid, or clean grid.
- A significant design change involved rotating the grid to make intersecting tones the quadrants, simplifying user understanding.
- Facilitating critiques was essential to gather diverse feedback and iterate on UI design.
- Challenges included deciding how aggressively to map tones on an infinite dial, balancing a freeform interface with structured tone presets.
- Different UI designs were explored, including the use of guiding markers and tooltips to educate users, enhancing user engagement.
- The exploration phase involved experimenting with colors and tooltips to improve user education and engagement.
- Discussions considered whether intersecting tones should be explicit presets or discovered through user interaction.
- The process required balancing simplicity in user experience with the complexity of design blueprints.
4. ⚙️ Overcoming Design Hurdles: Presets and Usability
- The design team iterated quickly on dial design, focusing on clear structure and shadows, but struggled to integrate presets effectively into the experience.
- Initial concepts included visual thumbnails for presets, which were ultimately confusing in the properties panel as they were similar to text styles.
- Exploring embedded presets in the properties panel revealed user feedback favoring a dial-first interaction.
- Several iterations, including hiding presets in long lists or using user interaction to reveal them, were tested but found to be confusing.
- Ultimately, a simple, repeatable design was settled on where the dial is primary, with accessible yet unobtrusive presets, effectively balancing usability and functionality.
5. 🖌️ Fine-tuning the Experience: Shadows and UI Refinements
- The introduction of a pencil icon with an AI magic sprinkle signifies AI usage in presets, providing an intuitive entry point for accessing the full rewrite feature capabilities.
- The rewrite feature leverages a large language model (LLM) to perform a variety of rewrites, such as rhymes and tone changes, enhancing user engagement and offering more flexibility.
- Initial feedback indicated that users found presets limiting, prompting improvements to make full LLM capabilities more accessible.
- A recent update, rolled out over 10 days, introduced significant UI improvements and new features in Figma slides, enhancing overall user experience.
- The tone dial feature now supports multiple languages, including Japanese, Indonesian, and Spanish, allowing effective tone adjustments in these languages.
- An easy, quick entry point for users to prompt themselves for different copy options was added, improving usability and customization options.
6. 🎬 Reflective Insights and Future Directions
- Design enhancements focused on adding depth and a tactile feel through shadows, even if not always noticeable to users, resulting in a more lifelike and engaging interface.
- Collaboration with engineers who have strong design acumen was emphasized, allowing for iterative design improvements and a final product that satisfies both designers and engineers.
- The iterative design process involved multiple rounds of adjustments and feedback, highlighting the importance of collaboration and refinement in achieving the desired aesthetic outcome.
- The design QA process revealed that shadow effects in dark mode significantly improved visual appeal, demonstrating the impact of attention to detail in user interface design.
- Personal satisfaction and passion for design intricacies were conveyed, underscoring the value of craftsmanship and aesthetic detail in product development.
The Wall Street Journal - The Complex Tech Behind Counterfeit-Resistant Cash | WSJ Pro Perfected
Banknotes from around 30 countries incorporate secret patterns to prevent photocopying, a measure among many to combat counterfeiting. The US dollar, despite being the most traded currency, has some of the least secure notes, particularly the $1 bill, which hasn't been redesigned in over 60 years due to its low value and the logistical challenges of replacing it globally. Banknotes employ three tiers of security: the first targets casual counterfeiters with tactile features like the feel of the paper, the second uses magnetic inks to prevent machine spoofing, and the third involves molecular-level features known only to central banks to prevent state-sponsored counterfeiting. Despite these measures, counterfeit notes still circulate, often due to human error or lack of scrutiny. Advanced techniques like microlens printing are being developed but are costly. The US $1 bill remains unchanged due to its low counterfeiting risk and the complexity of redesigning and replacing it globally.
Key Points:
- Banknotes use tactile features and unique materials to deter casual counterfeiters.
- Polymer notes and microlens printing are advanced security measures but costly.
- Magnetic inks help prevent machine spoofing but can be tricked.
- Central banks use undisclosed molecular-level features as a fail-safe against sophisticated counterfeiting.
- The US $1 bill hasn't been redesigned due to low counterfeiting risk and logistical challenges.
Details:
1. 💰 Secret Patterns on Banknotes
1.1. Secret Patterns and Their Role in Preventing Counterfeiting
1.2. Technological Measures and Economic Impacts
2. 🔍 Layers of Protection Against Counterfeiting
- Central banks use a tiered approach to counter counterfeiting, addressing threats from casual counterfeiters to sophisticated state-sponsored actors.
- Expert Shaun Ferrari, with 16 years at the Federal Reserve, highlights the complexity of U.S. dollar security features designed to deter counterfeiting.
- The first defense layer involves the unique texture of currency, crafted from a proprietary blend of cotton, linen, and paper, presenting a replication challenge for counterfeiters.
- In response to the bleaching and reprinting of lower denomination notes, countries are increasingly adopting polymer banknotes, noted for their distinctive plasticky feel.
- Ink feathering, a characteristic of genuine banknotes, acts as a forensic tool to trace counterfeiters, illustrated by a 2024 case in Naples where €11 million in fake notes were seized.
- Advanced security features like transparent windows, color-shifting ink, and holograms, though not entirely foolproof, have been integral since the 1980s.
- Microlens printing, a cutting-edge and costly technique, enables the creation of 3D images on notes, enhancing security, as employed by producers like Crane.
- Swiss banknotes incorporate state-of-the-art security features and cost about 45 cents each to produce, reflecting significant production investments, illustrated by the issuance of 41.5 million new notes in 2024.
- Despite these advanced features, counterfeit deterrence heavily relies on vigilant human inspection, which is often lacking, contributing to the circulation of fake notes like movie props, which constituted 12% of the $100 million in counterfeit notes in circulation as reported by the US Secret Service in 2019.
3. 🛡️ Advanced Counterfeiting Measures
- Level two security measures are implemented to prevent advanced counterfeiters from spoofing vending machines. These include the use of magnetic and non-magnetic inks that create patterns readable by sensors.
- Central banks maintain security by withholding detailed information about security features from note scanner manufacturers, minimizing the risk of leaks.
- Despite these measures, counterfeiters sometimes succeed by focusing on single security features, such as magnetics, suggesting the need for more comprehensive multi-faceted security approaches.
- Updating magnetic patterns is relatively inexpensive, but significant costs arise from updating bill validators to recognize new features, suggesting a need for cost-effective updating solutions.
- Additional technologies that can be employed include holographic elements and advanced microprinting, which are harder to replicate and add layers of security.
- Countries vary in their implementation of these technologies, with some employing a combination of features to enhance overall security efficacy.
4. 🔒 Ultimate Security Levels
- Counterfeiting poses a critical threat when undetectable by humans, machines, or central banks, potentially destabilizing governments.
- Historical example: During World War II, Nazi Germany produced 350 million counterfeit pounds to undermine Britain's economy.
- In 2006, the US alleged North Korea circulated $45 million in counterfeit 'Supernotes', though North Korea denied this.
- Modern security measures include undisclosed molecular-level features in banknotes, involving unique chemical reactions to light or lasers, enhancing detection and authenticity verification.
5. 🇺🇸 The Untouched $1 Bill
- The $1 bill has not been redesigned in over 60 years despite there being 14.9 billion $1 notes in circulation.
- The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing states the $1 bill is rarely counterfeited due to its low value, making redesign costs unjustifiable.
- Recalling and replacing nearly 15 billion notes globally presents logistical challenges.
- Many countries use US currency as a store of value, complicating global recall efforts.
- Designing and distributing new banknotes is a lengthy process; the $100 bill redesign started in 2003 took a decade to circulate.
- Federal legislation exists that prevents the redesign of the $1 bill.
- Maintaining trust and faith in the US currency is a reason to avoid changes, ensuring it remains good and redeemable.
