Week 2

Labs

We began the week with presentations of our data challenge projects from software bootcamp. It was intriguing to see all of the different research questions people investigated. With software bootcamp over, we were introduced to the myriad of labs REU researchers would be working in. After hearing the possibilities, I chose to work in Dr. Barnes's lab with Yihuan Dong on a project called Snag' Em. Snag' Em is a social networking game to help people in the academic community meet eachother in contexts such as community college or research conferences. The game's founders premeired it at the STARS conference in 2009 and 2010 with relative success, though they also introduced it to CCI community college where it experienced significantly less use [1]. My fitst role will be to redesign the interface so that the game is inviting and intuitive to new users. If time allows, I will make development changes in hopes of making the game more appealing to community college students.


[1] Powel, E., Stukes, F., Barnes, T., & Liptford, H. (2011). Snag' Em: Creating Community Connections through Games. In 2011 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, and IEEE International Conference on Social Computing.

Coffee

After spending so much time in Berkeley and Seattle surrounded by coffee hipster finatics, I must confess I think I've become one myself. So, I spent some time over the weekend cafe hopping till I found Cup of Joe, an adorable shop with good coffee and comfy chairs that quickly became my new favorite Sunday morning study spot.