by Ricky Chen This summer, I joined Marti Louw and Daragh Byrne for the NSF funded summer Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) program in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon to better understand and explore how research is conducted in the fields of learning science and design. Previously, I was working with them during the Spring semester on prototyping the physical booth space and digital interfaces for Quaker Valley’s self-directed learning initiative. While I worked on this a bit during the summer, my main learning outcomes are from learning to conduct more formal user research in the format of design probes as well as qualitative data analysis.
Establishing the Design Brief For the initial few weeks of the summer program, I worked with Marti and Daragh to figure out what I would actually be doing by reviewing research literature from places like CHI, TEI, and DSI while also becoming more familiar with user-centered research and methods. Some of the literature, especially the ones from William Odom, were really interesting, and I will likely reference these works in the future as I am working on more projects. In the beginning, I also established a routine and organized way of collecting my daily reflections, thoughts, and notes on the work I am doing through a platform called Notion. Doing research on documentation and the benefits that come from the practice has really inspired me to incorporate various means of documentation throughout my everyday life. Now, I basically use Notion to document everything I do in a way that is organized, clear, and yet personal. Overall, from these first few weeks, I was able to clarify my summer direction as I wanted to focus more on documentation in the context of remote learning as well as better understanding the student perspective of this practice. Research through Design Probes Motivations After going through the literature and research methods, I focused on exploring design probes to better understand how to support student documentation practices during remote learning. These are some of the main motivations for the research.
Analysis After, I organized the results of the research probes into a grid format to quickly move between days and activities as well as quickly annotate and take notes of any analysis. For each activity, there were different analysis strategies used to code and synthesize the information from the design probes. For example, on day 4, I would color code similar values and incentives to create an organized visual for which ones were appearing more frequently as well as whether they were more extrinsically motivated or intrinsically. The interview audio/transcripts were also analyzed and coded to help identify and synthesize themes throughout the probes. Here is a visual of all the activities laid out and annotated in their grid format. Results After going through the analysis, there were a lot of thematic areas and insights to show, and some of the key thematic areas include:
Conclusion
From these new insights and thematic areas to focus on, I will be applying them to further research and projects that are done with Marti and Daragh on Smart Making Spaces. One project that my insights will go towards is the designing of smart toolkits for students in Physical Computing. Since some students are now remote, I will be applying what I have learned this summer to create kits alongside Miranda Luong to help prompt documentation and reflection at different moments of physical computing projects in both in-person and remote contexts. The design probes that I worked on are also a pilot study to test the methods for possible Fall deployment with IDEATE students. While there are adjustments needed to be made to these probes, hopefully, they will be able to pull more interesting and useful insight that would allow us to better understand how students perceive and navigate through the practice of documentation.
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