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!

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.

At long last

There isn't much to post about.  Our lives have become pretty much routine here at Bug Theater.  Tutorials, posters, quizzes, games, classifying, repeat...  We're getting pretty good at the routine though.  Everything will be up and running perfectly for fall semester. 
We do have one bit of news though...we have all received scholarships for the Grace Hopper conference this fall.  They cover our lodging, meals, and airfare so we are beyond thrilled to receive them since it means we will be able to attend the conference together. 
The minor changes in our routine will be arranging things with our scholarships, creating a new more compact poster, and a few other little details for the conference. 

Quizes

Well along with our normal schedule of posters, games, and videos we are also creating quizes for the beginning CS class (CS1400).  We are creating mini quizes to test the students on the chapters in the book.  Each quiz covers 2 chapters and will have about 5 questions, and then some different ways to solve each question.  Hopefully these quizes will help prepare the students for their tests all along the way and improve their understanding.

So Much To Do

Over the last couple of weeks we have finished some Flash games, Camtasia videos, started some practice tests, and made a few minor changes to the website.  We still have lots more to do though.  The website will be posted tomorrow and we are doing some usability testing on it this week.  If it sounds like we do the same things every week, it's because a lot of the time we do, just with different bugs.

Usability Testing

As we start adding more applications to the website this summer we figured we should have some people test it out before we add all the other stuff.  We have written up a few things we will have each tester do to see if things are easy to find, that the website looks organized, and it's user friendly.  We also have two new Camtasia videos and a Flash game to go on the website. 
Our Grace Hopper info for the conference info booklet.  Not only will there be an overview of our project but there is a little bio and photo to go along with it.  You know you've made it to the big time when your photo is published!
We are also starting a new page for our website that will have possible test questions for the CS 1400 and CS 1410 classes.  After solving the problem they will be able to see 3 or 4 correct solutions for each problem.  Right now we're in the process of finding some good problems and creating the new page for it.

Grace Hopper...Again

All of our Grace Hopper program information is due at the end of this week. We are gathering all of the needed information and praying that there isn't something we're forgetting.  Last week we started preparing this information and created some new tip posters for the tutor lab.  We've also finished some Camtasia and Flash stuff that should be posted on the website soon.