It’s week 8! I can’t believe it’s been eight weeks, feels just like yesterday I was at Bradford woods and going over the first-week boot camp.
Girl Scouts
This week some of the faculty and graduate mentors were working with the girl scouts this week. Kate and some of the graduate students had a small soldering workshop, where we showed the girl scouts how to properly solder a paper circuit. This was an extremely fun activity and was good to hear all of their aspirations. My first girl scout was a little, shy but one of the REU’s came over and helped get the activity going. The second girl scout, Lauren was extremely nice and I was more comfortable and confident about how to properly demonstrate my soldering technique. Overall, it was a very fun experience interacting with the youth.
Poster!!
Earlier this week we iterated on our poster and got some initial designs finished based on ideas from Haley, Rashmi and posters in the pro-health common area. On Wednesday, Fernando and Tom held a workshop where we briefly went over our poster speech and discussed our current iterations on our post. We got a lot of valuable feedback and design ideas for our poster layout. Poster draft.
Lightning Talk
I need to work on my lightning talk. After my short presentation on Wednesday, I felt I really needed to work on my elevator pitch. I was pretty nervous this time around because I went first and was put on the spot. Going forward I think I need to be able to effectively communicate in a more concise manner what HomeSHARE is, and what our focus as REU’s are.
Transcription and Analysis!
This week we spent a lot of time working at ethos, with Cassie’s dog! Hanifa and I transcribed the video files from our co-design session, then compared out transcriptions for errors. This was so much fun! I’ve never done any kind of qualitative research before so this was a very eye-opening experience. We spent the following days working outside analyzing the transcriptions and coming up with our code. We also iterated on themes we were going to discuss in our research paper to work on in preparation for our meeting. We found a lot of similarities between the Harrington Paper in themes that were repeated in our co-design session.
Storyboard
This week we iterated on our storyboard template, and I’m tasked with coming up with our creative storyboard for HomeSHARE!. Is it going to be cool? I will have a pretty good representation of what our project is about and what we’ve done over the summer.
Fishing
Went fishing Thursday night! My roommate Ben, GTap REU Waki, and I went to Monroe lake. It was a very relaxing experience, caught a few fish and had an overall good time fishing, bonding and taking a short 3-hour break from reality.
Networking
After talking with my roommate, and a fellow GTAP student we befriended we got into the field HRI/HCI and one of the professors they discussed, I came across in doing my literature search for HomeSHARE Professor Selma Sabanovic. Coincidentally, that was one of their mentors and someone who Haley previously worked within her R Lab on campus. This week I had time to really pick their brains on HRI and acquire insights into Selma’s research. Today I also went to the R-Lab to hang out and one of the CS students also went to my alma mater. We briefly discussed the lab and the projects they were working on. I also emailed professor Sabanovic after some peer pressure, and hopefully will have time to meet her before the REU program ends!
Harrington, C. N., Wilcox, L., Rogers, W., & Connelly, K. (2018). Designing Health and Fitness Apps with Older Adults : Examining the Value of Experience-Based Co-Design.