Week 1: Most of my first week of research involved reading papers and meeting with Professor Powers to discuss our goals and plans. I am going to be helping teach a Comp11 class next Tuesday in order to collect some data about what types of problems people have when learning about objects for the first time. Hopefully these questions will help guide our research this summer. I have been helping to develop a lesson plan and some directed questions for a "quiz" that will provide the data we need. On Friday we took a trip to Reading to meet with Leanne (a grad student who also works with Professor Powers) to discuss the plans we have made this week.
Week 2: I spent Monday and Tuesday preparing for Comp11 on Tuesday night. I came up with my lesson plan, powerpoint, and the two surveys and quiz that we used for assessment. Tuesday night I taught for three hours! I was so nervous before class started, but it turned out pretty well. I spent most of Wedesday figuring out what we could use from the quiz results. Thursday I finally got to finishing the data from the spring semester surveys and started downloading Greenfoot and Jeroo and working through their tutorials.
Week 3:Monday afternoon I met with Professor Powers to talk about a new direction we might take with the project. We are wondering whether or not Alice is actually good for anything and started discussing possible alternatives for the comp10 class this fall. I spent the rest of the week installing programs, playing around with them, looking up textbook possibilities, etc, etc to get more information about how these other options might be helpful.
Week 4:Most of this week I was at home visiting my family, but on Thursday I met with Professor Powers so that I could pick up some books about Java with multimedia using DrJava. Friday I read and played around with DrJava.
Week 5:On Tuesday, Leanne and I met with Professor Powers for another lunch in Reading. We talked about all of the different options for the comp10 class this fall and tried to decide what would work best for the students and still give us some valid results when we compare the two sections. We went back to campus and started looking for books to use for one of the sections of the class. I spent most of the week looking for and reading different Java texts.
Week 6:Over the weekend we got some bad news; Professor Powers will not be teaching the two intro classes in the fall so all of our prep for the experiment is pretty much useless. She may still be getting one section so that we can try something, but what we actually do is still dependant on her other classes...bummer! We met this week and started talking alternative plans. We will spend our energy on writing a paper for the SIGCSE deadline in September and then, once Prof. Powers knows more about her schedule we will figure out what is going on for the fall.
Week 7:Leanne and I met with Professor Powers on Monday to outline the paper and discuss topics of interest.
Week 8:We met again to talk about what we would be doing with the one comp10 class in the Fall. We ended up starting to talk about a survey. Leanne and I worked on that most of the week.
Week 9:We finished up and submitted all of the IRB stuff for the fall survey. We also wrote the survey and worked on the paper.
Week 10:This summer went by really fast! We spent the week working on the paper and finishing up all the loose ends. Paper has been submitted to SIGCSE!!! We will see what happens...