This week I made this very website, and afterward put together the program with which my study will be conducted.
This day I conferred with my mentor to better clarify the end goal of my project at the AIR Lab. In between emails, I learned HTML enough to make this website. After finishing the structure of the website, I filled in as much as I could for the weekly journals (the first week and then this block here).
Afterward, I changed some elements of the procedure outline and notes to reflect what my mentor and I agreed upon.
Afterward, I finished my website as much as I could this day. I had a lot of trouble getting the Project Description page to link to the pdfs of papers I had read ( which seemed like a reasonable thing to do -- provide links to my research and have a bibliography of sorts). The links kept leading to '404 File Not Found' error pages, but after a long while I found the problem: the filenames in the code all referred to the folder 'Articles' as "Ariticles" so the references were all broken. I fixed that problem (and a few more - this day was not a spelling day for me) the pdf links worked just fine.
This day I continued work on the software design - I figured out a way to randomize the order of runs for each participant by asking their favorite number and using that as the seed. Clever and a cute move.
Afterward, I downloaded Unity3D onto my laptop to use for my project. I have used Unity3D before (my internship last summer used Unity) but I definitely could have used a refersher, so I redid the starter tutorial Unity provides entitled "Roll a Ball" to reaccustom myself with the UI and how to do everything.
Afterward, I began work on implimenting aspects for the final program, namely the Task class, a static class for randomizing the task order each time, and the methods in the driver for utilizing that randomization. I have not used C# (the language for scripting in Unity3D) in about a year and even then I did not do a lot of what I have done this day and will do going forward; needless to say, it can be slow-going at times since I need to look up how to do something every now and then.
This day I continued work on the presenting software (referered to as "n-Back Task Presenter" so far this day knows). I worked on what to see past the start menu and some more back-end coding such as classes for handling playing the fifteen or so specific audio files that play plenty of times throughout the experiment.
Notable difficulties mainly come from my inexperience with Unity being used in the way I am looking to do so, and my inexperience with C#. As I become more comfortable with both I expect I will find fewer simple problems like those I have been experiencing; I will finially graduate to complex problems. I look forward to that day.
This day I made a lot of visible progress - that is, I implimented the instruction-showing aspects of the program (both text- and audio-based) and the presenting-the-task elements (both text- and audio-based). I then began working toward writing a participant's scores for the tasks to a file after completing all tasks.
It was suggested to me to add pictures where relevant to my website, so the following are a few snapshots of my Unity space while at various points in the program.
Instructions presented for the 0-Back Task.
Welcome screen for the program.
Instruction screen for the break given after a run.
This day I pretty much finished up the presentation software, including sending flags to iMotions dictating when a task starts (and that task's level), when a task ends, and when the participant submits an answer (and if the answer is correct). The next step at this point was to alpha test it on the hardware we use for experiments, which will have to be earliest Monday.