NAEP Uses Video-Game Design for New Technology and Engineering Test

A new interactive test from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) aims to measure students' Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL). These tasks measure students’ capacity to use, understand, and evaluate technology, as well as their ability to understand technological principles and strategies.

Want to learn more about the new Technology and Engineering Literacy assessment...

• NAEP news on Education Week
• Sample of the TEL task
• NAEP’s New Report Card: Measuring Technology and Engineering Literacy
• What is Technology and Engineering Literacy?

Wireframe:

A wireframe is a low-fidelity representation of a product’s design.
The visual characteristics of a wireframe are very limited. Usually designers just use boxes, lines, and a grayscale color palette (to represent different levels of visual hierarchy in the design).

Interactive Wireframe (figure)
Sometimes designers like to increase the fidelity of their work a bit to stress the importance of certain parts of the UI, as well as to present and quickly test the soundness of interactions between elements. A very popular way of doing that quickly is the creation of an interactive wireframe, also known as a clickable wireframe.

Prototype:

A prototype is a mid- to high-fidelity representation of the final user interface.
The goal of a prototype is straightforward: Simulate the interaction between the user and the interface.

Visual Characteristics of a Prototype When it comes to aesthetics, a prototype may closely resemble the final version of the product.

Basically, a prototype looks like the final product (figure), but it just doesn’t have the nuts-and-bolts yet (i.e. HTML, CSS, JS, server-side programming, databases, etc.).