Over the summer, there were several changes to our TIDESS project team. We said goodbye to Carrie, who won a prestigious award to help her finish her dissertation (defense scheduled for October 25!), and Peter, who graduated. We welcomed two REU students, Ian and Saylie, and had temporary help from grad students Shae, and now Sarah. We even said goodbye to an advisory board member, Betty Dunckel, who retired from a long career at FLMNH, and welcomed Julia Plummer from Penn State in her place, who we met at NARST. Whew!

It was a busy one, though, as we resubmitted a paper to a conference, the first time we’ve had a revise-and-resubmit process for computer science conferences. We also submitted our first paper on the education side of things for International Journal of Science Education, Part B. This was based in large part on the work we presented at NARST. We also submitted as part of a symposium of posters on scientific practices in informal science education settings for NARST 2019. We submitted our second NSF report, and we ran a gesture elicitation study, all while continuing to develop the software and exhibit for the sphere.

Now that fall semester has started (it’s already week 4!), our smaller team heading into our third year (the no-cost extension year of the project) will be focusing on wrapping up what we can of these studies and planning for future work. Hannah and I are really digging into the design of our next embodiment study, with Carrie’s help as she is available. We are hoping to get to run an in-museum study this spring or next summer, but with Betty’s departure from the museum, things there have been in flux in terms of personnel. So as always, stay tuned!

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