The big news for this week is that we finished teaching our HCI for teens course! We had class on Monday and Tuesday and then on Saturday the students presented their work to all of their classmates, friends, and parents in a school-wide end of summer show. On Monday in class the students worked on perfecting their advertisements and doing practice presentations in front of the class. At the end of class they tried-out to be in the Saturday show and well, obviously they made it. The students did a short skit where they tried to sell their designs to Bill Gates, who was played by another student (it was very cute).
During Tuesday's class the students finished perfecting their designs on the computer and typing up their advertisements. While they were working Taneshia, Sarita, and I walked around the room and did short interviews with the students to find out what they thought about the class, if and how their career aspirations had changed, whether they would like to do a design job, or even take design classes. Overall the students were just ready to be done with school so their answers to our questions were short and sometimes joking. Unfortunately they were not focused enough to give us straight-forward, well thought out answers. Oh well, we did find out some interesting things.
Many of the students did not change their career aspirations very much. The students who knew exactly what career they wanted at the beginning of the class had not changed their career aspirations. Those students who didn't know what career they wanted to pursue still did not know what they wanted to do. However I think the students learned a great deal about the design process and when they look at a piece of technology now they can appreciate that someone had to design it and it probably took a lot of work.
On Monday and Tuesday morning I spent my time working on my final report, trying to crank out a rough draft and get lots of ideas out there. On Wednesday I worked on doing another revision of the HCI guide and it is looking really great! I am very excited that we will be able to distribute this booklet to teachers and they can just pick it up and teach it to their students (hopefully that will happen). Also on Wednesday we had our weekly lab meeting.
I spent Thursday transcribing the interviews from Tuesday (about the students' final thoughts of the class). This process was slow as usual, but it was very interesting to go back after having forgotten about it for a while. I had forgotten what some of the students had said and so that made the transcriptions pretty interesting. I finished up the last bit of the transcribing on Friday and I also finished my second revision of the HCI guide. Well that's it for this week, tune in again next week!
Week 1
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Week 2
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Week 3
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Week 4
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Week 5
Week 6
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Week 7
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Week 8
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Week 9
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Week 10