This week had mostly been preparation for the actual studies. We had pilot studies with each other in our team, then with the graduate mentor, and then on the first day, we had Joey from another team for our first “real” pilot study. Then right after I got a study with him for his study.

The next day we had a study with Allison, then I got a study for Tian and Dylan, then we had a study with Dylan. Right after, we also had a study with one of our professor mentors who gave good feedbacks and new insights on our questions and study itself.

The only feedback on the study’s demo itself was to set up a typing indicator which I thought of doing but just didn’t bother. I tried to do it and I was stuck for a bit. However, I figured it out quite quickly afterward and got the ball rolling, and had it done by the end of the day. The demo itself didn’t have the ability to detect if the user is typing but luckily from the previous addition where I was holding words until the user has pressed space, enter, or other triggers. I decided to simply call the holding process “typing” and the triggers as not “typing” anymore. The timings are very similar but it is actually not an accurate reflection on whether the user was actually still typing. However, I think that would suffice for the purpose of our study.

We adjusted other questions according to our professor mentor’s feedbacks and also our main narrative script as my partner seemed a bit nervous and felt the need to elaborate more details than needed for the study. Since we gave out lesser details on some participants and more on others, that could affect our results, so I wanted to make it consistent as well like how we had done the video and text. Then we also adjusted other questions outside of the demo too. I also created a participant spreadsheet for one of our supervisors to keep track of payment status as well as for us to note for contacting them and scheduling appointments.

The next day, unexpectedly, some of the forms were deleted and replaced over when their questions could’ve been changed in about the same amount of time. This broke the links to my demos which is easy to fix if there was only one form or there was only one website, but technically we had 7 websites and 7 forms so it would be quite tedious to go through each one. Additionally, the responses from the pilot studies were gone. Although we won’t actually use those data, it’s good for completeness as we have about half of the other forms except the few that got deleted. It’s also viable information to make early expectations as most of the participants did answer truthfully. At first, we thought the files were unrecoverable, but luckily they were still around. I recovered them and changed the questions myself. Crisis averted.

Feeling good, I decided to make a presentation. I got a strong feeling that they will be asking something similar to “how’s research?” like the movie they showed us at the end of the week. So I wanted to come off as pretty strong and made a pretty-looking presentation. I made it as brief and concise as possible. And as expected, they did ask just that with no other plans in mind. No other groups had prepared anything so it seemed to make our team shine a bit too excessively. I wanted to stay low-key but was still pretty proud of nailing the prediction and executing it perfectly.

So, about the movie, that I mentioned earlier, it was actually somewhat decent. It’s about two grad school students (one boy one girl) who are trying to get their degrees and there were a lot of common tropes like a dad thought that his son was going for a medical doctor, not a doctor related to STEM. They showed the existing grad students as sluggish and lacking in ambition, doing boring researches that don’t solve or answer many useful questions. It sounded like they were doing one of those researches where they found out by research that people go out less during the global pandemic. (Oh wow you don’t say!) Nonetheless, it had decent comedic timings and underlying messages conveyed well with nice literacy devices. One thing I noticed that they did intentionally was to not tell the character’s name. They subtly showed once that the professor didn’t remember the grad student’s name and then one more time after he had more success where he promptly told the professor his name firmly. There were few other intentional elements in there as well which make it overall pretty decent at least for me. However, one thing I noticed is that the other graduate student who was competing in the ballroom kind of said that rumba is harder than cha cha. She was showing another person the cha cha basic steps then when it’s rumba, she didn’t. In my impression at least, as a ballroom dancer, I disagree that rumba’s basic steps are harder. But that’s just around my university anyways so I can’t really say for sure.