After months of iterative prototyping, the TIDESS team was able to come up with a design for a prototype that we would move forward with. This is the prototype that we will be using in the studies we conduct. The prototype came about from a combination of ideas from our past prototypes and new ideas derived from the data in our Spring 2016 lab study.

To prepare for the study, the team got ready to do recruitment during two weekends at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Recruitment involved multiple team members engaging with museum-goers and passing out “packets” that had information necessary to contact the team about participating in the study. In particular, we were looking to recruit family groups of 2-4 which had at least one child of age 8-13 and one adult. This would allow us to observe how children and adults interact together on a museum exhibit. Recruitment overall, proved to be a challenge, as sometimes the museum didn’t have many visitors, which meant we gave out few packets. Also, out of the many packets we gave out, only a few groups responded. This led us to brainstorm a few other ways to recruit families. We drafted a short newspaper ad to put in the local newspapers and talked about possibly recruiting at a nearby school.

The next step after this was having a script rehearsed and logging materials ready. The experiment script is a guideline for the study that allows us to make sure the studies conducted are always consistent. For logging, we set up two cameras for recording in the lab study room and finished implementing a “logger” in the prototype, which records the names of gestures performed and other details from interactions with the prototype.

Once the details were sorted, we were ready to begin conducting our studies. We drafted up email responses to those families that inquired about participating, and began scheduling study sessions so that we could begin gathering data. This will lead us into the transition of the study on the tabletop to the one on the spherical display.

I’ve been working on the TIDESS project for two semesters now and have learned a great deal about research methods and research logistics. This is my first research project, and I’ve gained great insight as to how I should apply the methods and concepts I learned in my User Experience Design and Computer Science Education Research class. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed working on this project with my team, and I look forward to conducting the studies and collecting data so that we can move forward with the project.

by Annie Luc

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