IRB Submissions, Formative Study Wrap-up

This week was entirely focused on upcoming research papers and write-ups. The challenges study is creeping forward in terms of completion as I wrap up formative studies and start looking to set up summative studies with the Science Academy. As part of this effort, I began writing the formative part of that paper, which focuses on how challenges can be built to successfully engage users, especially beginners.

I came up with a list of key features challenges should contain to aid and compel novice users in getting started with Looking Glass. Some of these features can be summed up in the notion, "Can I create an interesting story using only say and walkTo?" Some beginners among my formative testing user pool became frustrated or gave up on their original story lines if there were obstacles in the scene that, while they may have made the scene more interesting, caused the user to have to understand actions like "move" or "setVehicle". Following the same thread, some novice users in my formative study were intimidated by scenes that didn't allow for social interaction between characters as a fall-back for creating a compelling story. For example, Ice Skating Bunny consists only of a bunny and an ice skating rink. This was a relatively popular challenge, and users always knew what story they wanted to tell, but each time the user required massive amounts of help to get started, and their enjoyment level seemed subpar toward the end. Being able to rely on "say" and "walkTo" for one's first scene may not help a beginner learn much about programming, but it does help them enjoy story teling as they start to understand the Looking Glass interface.

I also completed a modifaction to our IRB form to accomodate the challenges summative study. My hope is that soon enough gears will fall into place that I will be able to start setting dates and obtain participants for this leg of the challenges journey.