Tuesday, August 31, 2010

It has been a great year!

We finished our CRA-W CREU project and we are sad that it has come to an end.  Well, it's not exactly at an end because Amy will continue this work for her honors thesis, Ali is working on an independent study, and we will all present our work at the Grace Hopper Conference next month!   

This was a great experience and gave us an understanding of what research is.  "Research" and "graduate school" used to sound intimidating, but this experience makes it easier to understand what a graduate degree is all about. 

When we initially started our research project, we had some ideas about the bugs that we thought students encountered.  We collected over 600 bugs and learned that we were correct that many students encounter bugs, but the distribution of bugs was surprising.   Check out our data at: http://digital.cs.usu.edu/~bugs
  While you are there, watch some movies or play games and then give them a rating.  We learned Flash and Camtasia to create the games, movies, and quizzes.

Finally, we want to thank the CRA-W CREU program for funding us to explore research!  We hope that other students get the opportunity to work on a project and have a similar experience to us!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

The end is in sight.

We're nearing the end of the project - just one week left. It has come so fast. We still have to finish updating our website but we're so close!  Now we are just focusing on wrapping things up and getting our final reports in. We'll be sure to post again to finish off the project.
We have now bought our place tickets for the Grace Hopper conference in Atlanta, Georgia. We are really excited! This project has proven to be a lot of fun and very educational. We look forward to sharing our findings and results with others in the industry.
Overall, being a part of this team has been enjoyable and rewarding. It's certainly bittersweet that the end is so close.