This week has been testing my anxiety tolerance! 

Sarah and I fretted to no end about the research symposium, as seen from last week's post. We practiced and prepared and got all of our points down. Yet, when we got there, it was a lot more relaxed than we had initially thought. Our grad students tried to tell us this beforehand, but that didn't quell our nervousness. It was really nice to talk to people about our project to people who were genuinely interested in it. The experience was very validating, especially when teachers came forward when they recognized Bloom's Taxonomy!  It was also really fun to hear and see what all the other researchers were working on this summer, in particularly the researchers I had interacted with in the weekly workshops but didn't talk to outside of work. It felt like a big party more than anything!

However, the biggest source of anxiety this week is something unrelated to work activities. Instead, it is flight logistics! I've been stress packing all week, which may not necessarily be a bad thing, but for some reason it feels like I've been barely getting the actual packing done. 
Funny thing is, I am more nervous about missing my flight or not allotting enough time to go through security than I am of the flight itself. When I first came here, I arrived at the airport two hours before my flight left (another 7am flight mind you), only to find that the lines were non-existent and I found myself waiting around for about an hour and a half. However, here were are again, same fears, same procedures. 

​UPDATE: my first uber ended up rejecting me because his trunk wasn't big enough to fit my luggage and he didn't want my luggage on his back seats. I was able to make it to my flight still, with a mere 4 minutes to spare before boarding. Talk about cutting it close!

However, I made it back home in one piece (somehow) and reunited with friends and family (pictured above). Thank goodness!

This week marks the true beginning of the end. Our duties this week mainly consists of preparing for next week, which includes presenting our projects at the symposium as well as to the Computer Science department's heads. 

Our scheduled REU activity this week had us all present our projects individually, which was meant to help us get a little practice. One of the big soft skills they stressed throughout this entire experience is public speaking, and while I might be a little better at it, I definitely have a bit more practicing to do before I'm ready for the real deal. Despite presenting on a weekly basis, I keep finding myself speaking too fast and panicking which causes me to lose my train of thought.

Even though Veronica had only emailed us a day before our presentations, everybody seemed pretty well polished. Gah, and to think we are going to have to do this in front of professors next week!

Sarah and I also finalized our research poster; we decided to ditch a good chunk of our text in favor of more graphics. That just means we really need nail our presentation skills- which is the hardest part.

One may ask, what is the ideal way to spend your last weekend in Raleigh? Buy a last minute ticket to go to Supercon of course! Video games, anime, cosplay and comic books galore. I went Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and man, I was beat. Since there was a lot going on, I think only pictures can do this justice- so I am just going to leave a giant mash of pictures of here. All I know is that I made amazing friends that I will likely never see again ;m;

My partner in crime, Sarah, and I had knocked down a few obstacles this week. The biggest one was getting started on our poster for the NCSU summer research symposium; we really want our poster to pop since it's also going to SIGCSE and GHC. We both downloaded Adobe Illustrator, accepted our free trials, and got to work!
Thankfully there are numerous accessible resources that assist in research poster design. NCSU has guidelines online and winning examples, and a quick google search for tips also helps a lot! Sarah and I decided to go for an 'infographic' feel for our poster, because let's be honest, who doesn't love reading a well-made infographic?  Our first draft is shown below:

Pretty spiffy if I say so myself! Not perfect by any means, but not bad either. We printed it out on a piece of standard copy paper and left it out for the grad students (credit to Thomas Price, David Warren, and Yihuan Dong) to tear apart in the name of constructive criticism. They gave us some extremely valuable feedback! A few reoccurring critiques were:

• Far too wordy
• Image of the Cody Coursework Interface doesn't relate well to the text before and after it
• Design section repeats information present in flowchart

So, with that in mind, it gave Sarah and I great advice for what to do with the poster when we return after the weekend! Draft printing also opens up on Monday, and we're excited to see our work in progress poster blown up actual size! It will feel so much more real once we get to see in all its papery glory.

I can't believe we only have three weeks left. The people I've met here and the experiences I've had have made this entire research experience feel like a dream. It'll be weird when I don't see these peeps on the daily anymore! Although, home sickness is hitting me this week. I'm starting to miss my family, my boyfriend, and my friends back at home. Heck, I even miss taking classes at the University of Minnesota. While it's not impeding on my experience here and the people here, I find that I am making more phone calls home now more than ever. 
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Work-wise, we finished up the IRB and Sarah and I are now shifting our focus onto tidying small details that have been pushed to the side, as well as preparing to tackle the NCSU Summer Symposium. The Summer Symposium will include all of the summer researchers here, which isn't just us computer science folk. The other sciences will be represented, like chemistry, agriculture science, physics, etc. We will all be postering/presenting our projects while also getting exposure to everybody else's hard work. It will make great practice for any future poster endeavors.

On that note, your girl just found the CRA-W is going to take our poster to Grace Hopper this year! I've been wanting to attend Grace Hopper ever since I first found out about it, so it's a bit of a dream come true! Dr. Battestilli is also going to be taking our project to SIGCSE (think a conference about computer science education) which will be taking place in Minneapolis, so I will probably get to see Dr. B and our poster there too! It's really rewarding to see our hard work being recognized.

But now that we finished up that nasty IRB, we get to do the fun work now!
Sarah and may or may not have spent a good 20 minute deciding our color scheme. We scoured the web for ideal color combinations. We considered color theory. We considered specific types of color blindness. We argued over our personal own color preferences and distastes. We came to the conclusion that the colors the study graphic that I created were a good compromise. 

 The grad students here promised us a giant nerf gun war during our first orientation week, and they did not disappoint. We initially planned to play three rounds, but the first round of capture the flag ended up lasting an hour. We played in an auditorium on campus, and the other team couldn't find our flag that was hidden underneath/within one of the many chairs, and we couldn't get theirs that was jammed in the top part of the exit door. I never knew how empowering it is to shoot a giant plastic gun. I had a few Rambo-esque moments that I am pretty proud of. I can imagine it was probably pretty amusing for the grad students to watch a scrawny girl belting out foam balls from a giant nerf machine gun from the middle of the room, haha. I also may have also skinned my knees from stealthy army-crawling, but it was worth it.

This week was like how I prefer my eggs, scrambled. 
Terrible puns aside, we relied pretty heavily on the graduate students in out Lab this week. Thankfully, Sarah and I had learned previously to ask for help when we felt over our heads. Alex Milliken and Nick Lytle were of utmost help since they were a lot more experienced in everything to do with IRB's. Nick hooked us up with a google doc template to make collaboration between Sarah and I possible, and Alex spent several meeting hours giving Sarah and I the IRB101 run-down. She also provided us with an example consent form and an example pre-answered IRB to give us a jumping off point. Moral is, tap your resources so you can work smarter, not harder. Looking back, I kind of can't believe how Dr. Battestilli entrusted this time-sensitive task to two undergrads during their first research opportunity. It really made us feel like we were in the big league. We were treated as respected, knowledgeable adults, and we made serious progress like respected, knowledgeable adults.

We were making good progress on our project up until this point, until we were hit with a sudden realization in this week's meeting with Dr. Battestilli.

She's leaving for Bulgaria in a week and a half. 
We need an IRB, and all the supporting documents, polished, thoroughly researched, and put together before she leaves.

For those who are uninitiated in this research lingo (aka me about a week ago) IRB stands for Institutional Review Board. They are pretty much the committee that ensures research involving human subjects is conducted in an ethical manner. So, in order to get approval, we are required to send them a finalized detailed report of our how we will be executing our research project. This includes uploading copies of a final consent form and our survey/student perception questions. 
Have we started yet? Nope. Lovely.
Okay, maybe we have a couple of ideas in the air. But, nothing has been discussed to the extent where it can be finalized. Up until this point I have just been feeling my way around research. Thank goodness Sarah is back this week; as they say- a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.

We decided to use a cool concept I found called the Technology Acceptance Model for our questions regarding the automated grader, which provides a model for how an audience comes to accept and use a new technology as a normal part of their lives. I encourage further reading on the matter, as it really is pretty interesting. 

My boyfriend Brandon caught a flight from Minneapolis Minnesota to Raleigh North Carolina to join me for an extended weekend vacation this week. There was lots of adventuring to be had! We hitched a ride with Katrina to head to the East Coast; we were both determined to see the ocean for the first time.

This week was admittedly a little slow; there was a lot of smaller, less glamorous aspects of this project that needed a little tidying. I finally got the chance to play with MatLab and Cody Coursework, which is the center of our study. It was about darn time I got around to this! Learning the basics was not too difficult, as I was able to apply previous programming knowledge to MatLab. 

Although, I was able to flex some public speaking skills in front of a group of teachers that are also here for research.  There were two research speaker groups, one was a panel who answered the teachers' questions, and the other was a group that gave a run-down of themselves and their research projects; I was in the latter group. They were very intrigued with idea of autograding, even though the autograding I am working with may not necessarily directly relate to their coursework. I fumbled on my short speech a bit, but they were all a good sport about it!

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Imagine this:
You're stuck in a grey room with nothing but a window, a whiteboard, a desk, some chairs, and a couple of expo markers. You have been assigned to do one of the most difficult tasks in mankind: narrow down a research question. 
Jokes aside, it really is difficult to figure out and properly communicate what you want the focus of your study to be. Once you begin examining a topic, you start seeing all of the small facets that all play into each other in relation to said topic. This especially rang true with our project, as we are combining two different fields: computer science and education.
You have to ask yourself, "Is this aspect important? How does this aspect relate to everything else we know? Can we test it?" See below for the gargantuan monster of a concept map that Sarah and I frankensteined over the course of 6 hours (with a lunch break thrown in there of course).

(Side note: these are the summary visuals of all the other visuals I spent most of the week remaking) Look at all those outliers! While it may appear that Fall 2016 could be improved, that was the year before the autograder pushed an update that changed it's functionalities. We ended up concluding that we had insufficient data to deem these data sets usable.

However, we did come up with a research question that didn't involve any preliminary data. I won't post the entire question here since it is relatively lengthy, but it involved scaling question difficulties and seeing if it impacts the students' learning/test scores.

One last note before I move on to the fun stuff, I unfortunately had to temporarily bid Sarah goodbye this week. She's off helping lead high school computer science camps around the University; so it looks like the next three weeks I will be working independently. I am a bit nervous, but it's time to tap into that self motivation.

I'll keep this brief, but I managed to find out my all-time favorite bands, Arctic Monkeys, were coming to town three days before they came. I bought tickets immediately, and was roughly four feet away from the stage. At one point in their performance, their lead singer kneeled on the stage, looked me straight in the eyes, and reached for my outstretched arm. I am still reeling from this experience; it made the two-hour camp out in line worth it!

It's a good thing nobody has ever said that Undergraduate research is easy, because that would be a flat out lie. 

Thank goodness Sarah had experience with spreadsheets, otherwise I would have been totally lost! We were tasked with processing preliminary student data pulled from Dr. Battestilli's Autograders, and it definitely kept us busy for a good week. What information would be necessary to improve the use of autograders? Were students struggling with specific types of questions? Looking at a massive amount of data and trying to come up with a suitable research question from it is much easier said than done. Honestly, the graphs we had initially come up with didn't tell us much. See below for what I mean.

We may have spent about a day or two producing these terrible, illegible things. But, after we created a semester's worth of graphs, (not all four semesters worth, thank goodness) we consulted with the beautiful, the talented, the intelligent PhD student, Alex. She's been a huge help to Sarah and I this week- we desperately needed somebody to show us the ropes and Alex filled that need. She also told us what we already knew, these graphs don't tell us squat. However, she reaffirmed us that the time we spent on them was not in vain- sure, they weren't usable, but we learned what not to do next time!
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We did not have enough time to create more relevant visuals by the time we met with Dr. Battestilli, but we reassured to her that we recognized our mistake, and we decided that boxplots would be more effective in weeding out bad questions. Boxplots would reveal if some problems higher number of attempts than other problems, thus signifying a potentially bad question. 

This mishap served as a valuable lesson to Sarah and I: mistakes are abound, and if you're confused, ask for help before you spend too much time on something so silly!
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There's nothing quite like connecting with a bunch of other 'transplants' (aka us researchers from out of town) who are all passionate about the same thing you are. In this case, it is computer science. But, that is only the first layer! I bonded with my best friend here over other interests, like our shared love of running and the outdoors. I bonded with one of my other roommates at North Carolina's famous State Farmer's Market as we both gawked over the fresh peaches and cute succulents. The fun, accepting, understanding atmosphere that a this program cultivates has made the dreaded 'first week' a blast. At the end of the day, if I can move 1,242 miles away from home on my own and thrive, what else can't I do?
Week one has me raring to get some actual work done in week two!