Wk 6: Week of the Co-Design

Mentor meeting updates
On Tuesday we ran through our co-design with our mentors to get any last minute feedback before Friday. Katie gave us feedback on our color coding strategy for our slides and made some suggestions for the survey. Kay noted her concern about underestimating the time it would take to do this entire co-design. We initially ran our first practice co-design session on Friday afternoon and received a lot of feedback on that. We did our second round of practice for the co-design once more on Thursday. This allowed us to make changes based on the suggestions we received on last Friday’s practice session and Tuesday’s mentor meeting.

Throughout the week I made minor changes to our presentation slide that we used for the co-design. I also created a separate handout for all the facilitators to have so we could stay on track with the time. I believed this was one way to stay organized throughout the co-design. I also prioritized graphing on Android this week. I have been using PhilJay’s Graphing for my tutorials. This week Rashmi taught me how to download the entire package from GitHub and import it into Android studio. Through this, I was able to see the code for all of the demos PhilJay has displayed in his documentation! I wish I knew about this from the beginning. My biggest challenge that I faced this week was not being able to gauge how productive I was being. Since I prioritized Android tutorials this week, I spent A LOT of time staring at code confused, googling for more insight, attempting to follow some youtube tutorials/tutorials listed on blogs and ended up with “kind of” parsing data through a JSON file. It works.. but there is still much work to be done for that. Eventually, this data will be displayed in the graph I’ve been practicing with. I tend to base “productivity” on how many things I get crossed off of my to-do list. Whenever I devote my time to understanding something on Android, time flies by so fast.

Day of Co-design

Woohoo!! The ball is FINALLY rolling. We made it through our Co-design. It went much smoother than I estimated. We finished the entire Co-design in 1 hour and 5 minutes! Participants arrived early so we went ahead and gave them post surveys and had them get started on their nametags as soon as the post-surveys were done. By the time every participant was seated, we got started on our co-design! Originally, we planned on breaking down our 1 hour long co-design into four parts: ice breakers (10 minutes), post-it note activity (25 minutes), template activity(20 minutes), discussion (15 minutes). We ended up only spending 5 minutes or so on the ice breakers (having the participants get started on their nametag exercise while some people did the post-survey really helped with the timing for the rest of the activities). We completely underestimated the post-it note activity, (one of Kay’s concerns from Tuesday’s mentor meeting) , we ended up spending 35 minutes on this exercise! This ended up working out because participants only needed 10 minutes to themselves to draw their design on the template and spent the last 10 minutes to discuss their ideas with their visuals.  More details will come about this Co-design on next week’s blog when we analyze all of the data we gathered from this Co-design. 

Peer review
We made more changes to our final paper based off of the peer-reviewed comments we received. Our peer review response table can be viewed HERE.

Overall week reflection
This week was extremely busy and nerve-wrecking honestly. I am glad the Co-design is finally done, but I am very proud of how it all went. Several weeks devoted to reading academic articles related to Co-designs really helped us organize how we were going to do ours. One minor setback from this week was that my phone stopped working completely Thursday night (the night before the Co-design). This really did not help my nerves either. I did not sleep well Thursday night because I was afraid I was not going to wake up in time for work (luckily my roommate, Carla, volunteered to be my personal alarm for the morning of the Co-design).
Adjusted Timeline:

Wk 1: Ramp up week
Wk 2:
– read/summarize articles related to our study
– begin android tutorials and finish by the weekend (approx. 60 hours) [Udacity weather app]– Final paper deliverables* (view attached image/ deliverables are due on Fridays by 5pm.)
Wk 3
Start recruitment for Older adults and post flyers throughout Kirkwood
Continue android tutorials & finish on the weekend!
– Read ~ 2-3 papers
– Research helpful material for android development (will carry on to the weekend!)

Wk 4
– Final Paper deliverables
– Begin GoogleCode lab tutorial THIS DID NOT HAPPEN [graphing practice isntead!]
– Begin Model View View Model tutorial THIS DID NOT HAPPEN [Rashmi advised against this]
– Talked to Ninaad about graphing packages available for Android Studio that he recommends (he has experience with graphing). 
– Read ~ 2-3 papers (Read 1 paper, and Ben’s survey that he did for older adults)
Wk 5
Co-Design workshops  1 week wait,Friday Co-Design workshop with adults who wore our devices for a week. Plan co-design workshops, for implementation in wk 6
Read ~ 2-3 papers
– Final Paper deliverables
Wk 6
– Prototype data visualizationsCo-design workshop (pushed back by one week)!
Read ~ 2-3 papersEugene read most of the papers this week and I helped integrate the summaries created to the paper. 
– Final Paper deliverables
Wk 7
BUILDING TIME!  Prototype Data visualizations
– Read ~ 2-3 papers
– Final Paper deliverables
Wk 8
– Build
– Read ~ 2-3 papers
– Final Paper deliverables
Wk 9
– continue building/hopefully close to being done!
– Final Paper deliverables
Wk 10
– Finish final paper and celebrate making it through the Pro-Health REU!