Thursday, December 24, 2009

The basic website is up!

We finished up the first draft of the website!  Check it out at: http://digital.cs.usu.edu/~bugs

We have one Camtasia Video that auto-plays, an interactive Flash video, and statistics about the bugs.  We are over the majority of the learning curve now and will be able to improve the website dramatically next semester since we will be able to go into more detail!  We will add to the statistics to share examples of each category of bug and the median time spent on each type of bug.   We will add more Camtasia and Flash videos.  We will also continue to gather and analyze bugs from the tutor lab, hold peer review sessions for the freshman and sophomore female students, make posters for the tutor lab, present our research poster at the Utah Conference on Undergrad Research (UCUR), submit a poster to the Grace Hopper conference, and submit a paper on our work to FIE.   In addition, our faculty advisor is going to teach us about usability testing and we will organize usability testing sessions in the lab to further improve the design of our website.    Yes, we have quite a list of New Year's Resolutions for our project come January!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Catching up after final exams week!

The semester is over, but we are catching up on our hours and work since we took last week off to study and take our final exams.  Our submission to the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research (UCUR) was accepted!  We are registered and made our travel registrations.  We will present the poster in February, so we will be able to include the December bug data on our poster and present results for a complete semester! 

Now that the tutor lab is closed for the semester, we are caught up on the classifications of the tutor log forms for December.  We are back-tracking though because we want to go back to identify the min, max, and avg amount of time students spent on each class of bugs.  We think that not only the frequency of bugs are important to learn, but we also want to know the types of bugs that consumed the most time.

We are also working on the website.  It is in limbo right now because we are redesigning it.  We have two types of movies to post: (1) a step-by-step movie that shows how to find a bug (we made it with Camtasia Studio) and (2) a Flash video that is an interactive approach to teaching students about bugs.  Our first step-by-step movie is down, but we are still trying to finish our Flash movie.  We all watched the video and have been pair programming together, but we still need to solve our problem of making a link on a button in it. We are close to getting over the learning curve and once we do, we should be able to make the Flash movies quicker.

Finally, we are working on our mid-year surveys and will complete them this week.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Camtasia...and Turkey

With last week being Thanksgiving we can't say that we got a ton accomplished.  We did make it to the renovation phase with our Camtasia video.  All that is left on it is to do some spelling and grammar read through on it and for everyone to give it a final once over.  Then on to the big task...posting it!