Lesson of the day: Always carry an umbrella with you in Indiana (especially if you’re from a much dryer climate, such as Arizona, like me.)

Day 4 was a much more relaxed day and well needed. Or maybe I’m just getting used to the work. Not sure at this point. However, you get to learn your limitations of sleep. Today is the day we get to select our mentors too and it was pretty exciting to hear the last project team representative today. Many–most–of these projects require coding skills, or at least some experience, and this week was the first time I was ever exposed to the attempt of coding, so I was pretty nervous about where I was going to be placed. But lo and behold, I was matched with, I think the perfect project with Professor Katie Siek and Ben Jelen working with an elder community and teaching them the circuit boards and studying the affects of the crafting/design participatory models in learning technology. I’m really stoked to also be working with the middle school kids as well to try to reach out to them to pursue the STEM field as well over the summer. This will be a great experience in designing, observing, practicing trying to turn qualitative data to quantitative data, analyze it, and depending on the time line, hopefully analyze to the point to where results can be finalized. But the time line will be talked over tomorrow.

One of the workshops today was on using a tool called Dedoose and learned how to sort all observed data and using affinity diagramming then turn it into qualitative data that can be analyzed. It was a great tool to use and I’m sure I will be using it for our projects, which is good since it was the one I was most comfortable using during this week. What was great was that during the presentation, Annu Prabhakar kept really iterating how every observation and idea, no matter how crazy, matters! It was a informing presentation about a tool that really supports collaborative work.

We also have been going through updating our LinkedIn and (create) our web addresses. And apparently most universities give you the ability to create one through them, so I for sure went and created mine through Arizona State. But it is important to keep those professional presence online in a field that heavily involves technology, especially with social media such as Twitter too.

Another note that I have taken away from this week is that the bar is set extremely high for us by Professor Siek and knowing that I’m going to directly work for her for the next 9 weeks and so even though though I have stretched my limitations to what I thought was never possible to a point of exhaustion where I couldn’t even feel stressed, it was good for me for the fact that now I know my expectations for this research project.