Fall 2013 - Team Project

There are two major goals of this project; working with potential users to develop a prototype (interactive in some meaningful way, though likely not completely interactive) of a system that has the potential to become a real release and to document and reflect on the process of doing this. You will submit a draft "executive summary" of the project idea soon (and I will give some initial feedback there). We will be talking about user studies (and you will be reading about research ethics) as you are starting to work on the project, and before you need to perform user studies. Towards the end of the semester, you will submit your final prototype with a paper describing it and documenting the steps you took to get to it. Your team will also give a short in-class presentation about your prototype in the last week or two of the semester. As you are working on the prototype, you should add a new section to your journal Google Doc where you document your personal contributions and reflections on the process. In addition to providing me with a way to see everyone's contributions, this will likely prove useful when writing the team paper.

Please provide some journal updates to the readings section related to the ethics readings in the CITI training course.

November 6th: The team will have fleshed out their project option idea to a full "executive summary" for me to read as well as a draft of the informed consent form that will be used with participants.
November 7th: All team members should have the CITI training completed (before working with participants).
November 13th: The team should have met with several potential users for discussion of the idea or low-fi prototype explorations. There should be some form of (at least) a paper prototype started.
November 20st: All first-round interactions leading to a somewhat interactive prototype (or a thorough low-fi prototype if the team meets with me to explain why an interactive one isn't going to pan out) will be done and that prototype will be shown to me.
November 27th: Several informal user studies based on the prototype should be completed at this point so that you are ready for final revisions and write-up.
December 4th: The prototype should be completed and the team ready to give an in-class presentation (half of the presentations on the 4th, the others on the 9th).
December 11th: The team final report is due.



As you are working to prepare your in-class presentations, consider the following as an example structuring of such a presentation. Please practice your presentation to make sure it will fit into the 10-12 minute guideline (my suggestion is to aim for 10 minutes in your practice runs).
  • Have a PowerPoint set that starts with an overview of the project and then walks us through the processes your team used and shows some artifacts of the project.
  • Switch to a "live demo" to do or show.
  • Switch back to the PowerPoint for your summary and and some thoughts on future paths the project could take.


    • As you are working to prepare your written report, make sure that the written report contains everything that your in-class presentation contains, along with a written version of the narrative of how your project unfolded. In the written report it is fine to talk about challenges enountered and how the team met them. You will be able to provide more details here than during the class presentation. The written report should also give a summary of "highlights" of each team member's contributions.


    At the end of the semester I will also be asking everyone to assess their contributions as well as the contributions of each team member so think about the contributions being made by others as the project unfolds.



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