Meeting Minutes

Friday, June 15th
The program is finished and will be installed on Ms. Nowak's computer.

Tuesday, May 15th
The program, though incomplete, was shown at the CS92 party. Work will continue on the program until it is finished.

Friday, May 10th
The decision has been made to port the program to Director.

Tuesday, May 8th
Today, we gave a demo to the class of our current work. Because the connectivity of the program isn't yet finished, the program had to be presented in different parts. Comments from the class were made and will be taken into account. Because the Shockwave functionality is still not compatible, the program may have to be ported from Authorware to Director.

Tuesday, April 10th
We met before class with Nancy Nowak to discuss our questions and ideas. Nancy read over our proposed questions and made some corrections and suggestions. Basically, most of the questions were VERY high level for her students, but the material is proving to be particularly hard to test without incorporating vocabulary specific to materials science, and science in general. The question topics were separated into variables, scientific method, polymers, composites, metals, ceramics, properties, weight, and thickness, although Richard found it useful to combine topics, such as how an alloy is similar to a composite.

After talking with Nancy, it seems imperative to use audio with the questions, which will actually help in timing how long the answers (whether right or wrong) and the associated description of why an answer is right or wrong should be kept up on the screen. To prevent random guessing, the audio and possibly time delay on questions should work. Additionally, if a point scheme is drawn up for the quizzes, then there will be no points awarded for the wrong answer after two guesses.

We also need to rank questions, which Paul suggested putting in a tree that would give students harder questions in particular areas after they have mastered the easier questions. Richard will be working on the pool screen and the introduction to materials science, and if possible, an animation of the microstructures upon successful or unsuccessful dives.

Sunday, April 8th
We met in the MSLab to see the Paul's progress thus far with the quiz. Paul has established the answer randomizer so that students will not have consistent letter answers for each question. The randomizer worked great after a little bit of alteration, although this prevents some of the question types. For example, Mary had proposed multiple choice questions with "all of the above" answers, which will have to be worked out differently, as "above" doesn't refer to much if the answer is randomized to be at the top of the answer choices.

Mary showed her work on some of the lab material screens. Mary's question was successfully integrated into Paul's quiz, and the group is now fully aware that questions have to be constantly checked and reworked to ensure that students will be able to comprehend the content of the questions.

Thursday, March 22nd
We met with Janet and Brian to talk about what we now knew. They told us that rather than temperature, it would probably be good to look at the stiffness of the board. No extreme conditions are needed for that. Also, we gave them the final list of materials so that they could obtain stiffness constants and help us with the mathematical equations for the behavior of the board.

Tuesday, March 20th
We met with Nancy and went over the storyboard. From talking to her, we realized that we were greatly overestimating our audience. She stressed the fact that most of these students are socially promoted 7th graders,The example she gave was that she will give instructions with two steps, and they find it difficult to follow even that. So we need to make it very easy to follow.

Nancy also suggested that we use very simple language, and record voices to go with the text. Their reading skills are pretty low, and English is not the first language of all of the students. We decided that we would write up all the text and check it with Nancy before fully implementing it.

When we told Nancy about the idea of dragging a magnifying glass to an object to see its microstructure, she said this would be a really good idea. The kids like to drag things. She also said that she liked the hypothesis idea because it would allow kids to succeed for breaking the board, and they would think that was cool. She also said that she didn't think the idea of lots of checkboxes would make much sense to these kids. While this program may be used for other classes who would be able to use this functionality, we need to focus on Nancy's kids and what is best for them.

Sunday, March 18th
We read all the feedback from our classmates and discussed improvements that we could make. We decided that we should really talk to Nancy more about what she would want out of the teacher mode. A very helpful comment from most of the class was that we should really track students progress by analyzing their hypotheses, not the height or success of a particular jump. We stressed that we would like to teach kids about variables, so they thought that the checkboxes available in teacher mode should be accessible to the students as well.

We also finalized the list of materials and choices that we would have for the students. However, we wanted to talk to Janet and Brian about the feasibility of changing the temperature at all. We realized that most of the materials we are working with probably won't have drastic differences in behavior except at extreme temperatures, and this choice doesn't really make sense.

Friday, March 16th
Mary met with Janet and Brian and discussed the CD-ROM as well as how the project was going. They gave valuable feedback as to possibilities. They also said that they would talk to colleagues about pictures of microstructures for us to use.

Thursday, March 15th
We presented our storyboard in class. We got a lot of good feedback, but were unable to read it all and process it until Sunday.

Wednesday, March 14th
We finalized the storyboard and flowcharts in preparation for our presentation.

Friday, March 9th
We discussed the materials that we would be using, and we talked about getting our storyboard together. We made a sketch of what it would include, and started to make overheads for our presentation.

Friday, March 2rd
We discussed challenges that we saw as we explored the tools and their limitations. Paul mentioned that it would be necessary to design our animation in parts in order to deal with many different scenarios. We decided to continue familiarizing ourselves with Authorware and Director. Also, Mary obtained a CD-ROM and textbooks from Janet to see if they had images and information that would be useful for our program.

Friday, February 16
The design and the storyboard can't be furthered much until the tools at our disposal are explored. The Schank and Cleary book, Engines for Eduction, seemed to reverberate among the group because it highlighted so many aspects of our project of which we should keep aware.

Tuesday, February 13
Paul and Mary met with Prof. Rankin to visit Nancy Nowak and the middle school club. Richard was five minutes late, and missed the whole deal. The kids had interesting ideas for types of materials with which to make a diving board. Ms. Nowak also noted that the kids seemed to have difficulty with the idea of variables, which might somehow be highlighted in the program.

Friday, February 9
Our group finally met with Janet Rankin and Brian Sheldon, two Brown Engin professors in Materials Science. They briefed us on what the kids were like, and their idea of what the project might entail. Their thoughts stemmed from The Incredible Machine, a game where users create Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to achieve a goal, while battling against differing atmospheric conditions and being constrained to a number of objects with different properties. Paul is mainly concerned with the design of the project, Mary is concerned with the program interface, and Richard is concerned about how to effectively convey scientific principles.