I cannot believe how fast time is flying by! I am just about done with my first week of actual work, and I am pretty amazed by how much we’ve got done. For my work, I will be using biometric hand sensors (fancy fit bits) to determine different levels of student engagement with different learning activities, which sounds so simple and straightforward, but there is a lot of work behind even “simple” research. One of our main goals is to establish a methodology or protocol that other scientists will be able to use during their research. I’m very excited about the thought that my work really will be a valuable and usable contribution. And how are they all going to see this work, you may be asking? Why, in scientific journals, of course! I have been lucky enough to get a project that involves publishing scientific papers. I’ll have to continue working on them after the summer ends (doing an experiment, analyzing the data, making a poster and presentation, and writing up 2 or possibly 3 papers to be ready to be submitted for review). Finishing all of these items in 8 weeks is a little crazy, but we’ll have it done by the end of the year though. However, I am happy to keep working as long as it takes to get the job done.
So, this week! We have run a few practice studies on the other RECCS student researchers, which has been immensely helpful. I’m so grateful to be in a group that’s so willing to drop what they’re doing to help out someone else. We’ve got a lot of the logistics down, like where we’ll be recruiting from, what classroom we’ll be using, etc, but there is still a lot of fine tuning to do before we start running the real experiments the week after next. Next week will be devoted to recruitment and trying to learn MatLab. And speaking of MatLab and recruiting, I’ve got to get back to work! Gotta keep running!
Susannah
