Category: Capstone

For this week’s meeting with my mentor, I worked with Professor Brandenburger with some help from Professor Alex Ruthmann as well for the brainstorm. For my project, I want to focus on the intersectionality between education, technology, and social media, as well as how that supports student’s social-emotional well-being. Since my question was quite broad, I got some help from my mentor to narrow it down, as well as consider other questions with a startup mindset.

Link to mentor presentation

Motivation

My main motivation for this project stems from my frustration as a college student going through online learning. Since the pandemic, I have adjusted to online learning using zoom and other technology. However, the quality of lectures hasn’t been the best, and I also felt emotionally unsupported from the remote environment. After speaking with some of my peers, I realized that it is a common pain point of online school, ad how that left many students emotionally down and overwhelmed. This has also been a difficult situation to navigate, especially for students of marginalized groups.  Although the covid-19 situation has gotten better in some capacity, e-learning is here to stay. The online learning and education technology market isn’t perfect, and has a lot of potential to grow as a booming sector. Therefore, these reasons motivated me to concentrate my capstone around education technology and how to build a system/platform that helps students during this time, and to improve online learning.

Question #1:  How can online applications connect students with one another in a supportive and efficient manner?

For this question, I thought about how the social aspect/connection part of college has been extremely difficult and changed due to the pandemic. Many people I talked to and researched about have shown signs of depression and felt low during this time. I thought about maybe creating an application that allows students to connect with other students in their classes, university, and/or major in a one-stop-shop manner. Since many universities have large Facebook groups that are often uncategorized, I thought about creating a better-managed system that can categorize different aspects of being a college student, and support them. My inspiration stems from the NYUAD Room of Requirement Facebook group where students ask everything in. In addition, this may include course selection help, more inquiries about professors (that are not on rate my professors), dorm, extracurriculars, internships, and other areas as needed. This can serve as a support network ad social platform that allows students to meet other students in their classes through a short bio and photos + interests w/o utilizing other social media platforms.

Question #2: How can Educational Technology tools improve Student’s Social-emotional Learning and Cultural Competence? 

For this idea, I think social-emotional learning is a really interesting and important sector to examine. I thought about developing an e-learning platform or courses that provide support and social-well being courses for students through video-based technology. However, I still need to further develop this idea and conduct research, since the idea is very broad and hard to pinpoint.

Question #3: How can digital learning tools be used to support students’ learning outcomes and success?

For this idea, I want to focus on supporting student’s mental health specifically. I want to examine how to best support students using digital learning tools, so students can feel best supported, during this time and after the pandemic. I thought about building chat functions into pre-existing online learning platforms to engage with students and connect them to one another, making the process of meeting other students online easier.

Final thoughts

My mentors provided great feedback on scaling the problem, as well as inspirations for looking at pre-existing education technology tools, thinking about how to narrow down the problem, and define pain points for students using digital learning platforms. They also helped me think about who the buyers and ideal users are, with a business-driven mindset, and additional resources for prototyping. For my next steps, I will conduct more research on different student’s experiences with online learning, and how they can be best supported, to narrow down my problem. 

Week 1 (Feb 19-25)

Production Schedule

Week 2 

• Outline second part of essay
• Design and conduct user interviews to determine scope of the Twine game

Week 3

• Read 5 articles for essay research
• Conduct further user interviews and compile results

Week 4

• Write 300-500 words
• Design three more scenarios on Twine

Week 5

• Write 300-500 words
• Design four more scenarios on Twine
• Conduct first round of user testing

Week 6

• Write 500-700 words
• Finish first round of user testing
• Compile user testing results
• Write revised production plan based on user insights

The Brain Artist – An artistic experiment with brain-computer interface

This is the Neurosky EEG headset I’m using. It will record the electromagnetic waves generated by your brain and separate out different components. The two sets of data I’m using are attention level and meditation level. The headset is connected to the computer via Bluetooth.

This is the original data transferred from the Bluetooth server.

data2

And this is the data I’m receiving for visualization.

data1

This is the home page. It contains instructions and links to the three different interactions with the brain wave.

The first project is to create a flower like image with controlling your mental state. The more you focus, the cursor will move more towards the center, and vice-versa. The more you relax, the color will be more greenish, and the less relax you are, the whiter it will be. You can also control the speed, the number and the thickness of the stroke. You can pause and save the image whenever you find it worth saving. 

This is the link to the video documentation:

 flower

These are some works I saved during user testing and presentation. 

The second project I call it Space. You can use your keyboard/mouse to control a planet/black hole to attract all the other small planets in the space. The more you concentrate, the attraction force will be greater. And the planet you are controlling will be redder. And when you lose attention, the planets you have attracted will escape away. 

This is the link to the video documentation:

space

The third project is more open and more likes an experiment. Your attention level will control the left, right movement of the cursor, and your meditation level will control the up, down movement. You can also manually change the speed, thickness of the painter. 

This is the link to the video documentation:

canvas

These are some works I saved during user testing and presentation:

Vanelly Garces

Emotion Tagging x Data Visualization

Progress Update

Week 6: Production Schedule Assignment x March 19

Hashtags for the Week: #select #genres #organize

This week I mainly focused on getting an understanding of what songs I wanted to #select to have my future users listen to; I broke it down to where I had about ten songs per #genre.  I ranged this from top pop songs that are currently on the top charts to classic songs within that genre. Apart from this I went ahead and selected a range of emotions that users can select from, I stuck with about nineteen emotions that have a good range of what someone can feel when listening to a song. This week was mostly about just #organizing everything as well as creating a production schedule that would best fit my schedule as well as being as realistic and attainable as possible.

Week 7: Progress Report Assignment x March 26

Hashtags for the Week: #design #style #collect

This week my focus was primarily on trying to understand how I was going to get all of the data #collected. I know that it is going to be all on a website, and I want it to be a simple #design where the main focus is listening to the song and get to just take in what they may feel. This is why the #style of the site will be as minimalistic as possible.

Week 8: In-Class Work on Project x April 2

Hashtags for the Week: #testing  #firstattempt #hectic #manually

This week focused on my #firstattempt out my way of collecting data with users. I had not build the site and decided I would #manually collect data just to start collecting data and getting an understanding on how #testing would go and see how users would respond to this project in general. It was quite #hectic in the beginning on getting a good routine going but once people selected their song and was beginning to get a hang of it I realized how I would continue to move forward and work to continue to make progress.

Week 9: Show & Tell x April 9

Hashtags for the Week: #feedback #progress #switchingup

After this week’s show and tell I was able to get some #feedback from my peers as well as Leon and Anna. Leon pointed out that I should not waste time on the site and continue to just collect data manually and get that going so I can continue to work on the visuals of my project. Another great point that was made was that rather than having so many options and genres for a user to select, it was brought up to just focus on one song. This helps with making sure I collect a sufficient amount of data rather than just having very little data on each point. This brought up a good point  that I didn’t put much thought into and made me realize that having too many selections may not work so well. This helped me #switchup that aspect of my project and stick to just collecting data on two songs.

Week 10: User Testing x April 16

Hashtags for the Week:  #visuals  #colors #p5

After last week’s feedback I was able to focus on two songs that I wanted to continue to get data from, this being “Thank You Next by Ariana Grande” and “Not Steady by Paloma Mami”, I selected these songs based on two things. On the Ariana Grande song I decided that this would be a good song choice given that it is a Top 100 song that most people have heard and could potentially have a lot of different emotions tagged. As for the second song I selected to just focus on, this song is by a new artist and is a multilingual song. This could be interesting on how people would react to this. Another thing that made me decide to select this song was that I want to see how people would categorize this song and if they have any specific genre that they would attach this to. This week I also focused on the #visuals for my project, being inspired by the Arctic Monkeys music and their videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOSxM0rNPM) I wanted to create something similar for my visuals. I figured that this is something that caters to a minimalistic look that I was aiming from the beginning. I did this through #p5 and stuck with the look of the oscillations waves to fit something as to what AM video looks like given that I felt this was an interesting look.

Week 11: User Testing x April 23

Hashtags for the Week: #stuck #datacollect #feedback #interaction

This week was a bit difficult to work on everything, given that I was a bit #stuck on how I wanted to continue to go about things. Part of my project is to of course make sure that you can #interact with the project, however I was at a point where I did not want to have users add and just focus on showcasing visuals that represent all of the #datacollected. Yet, after this week’s user testing and getting more #feedback from the user testing we did in class. I realized that I had drifted away from my initial project idea. Not only do I have to create something in which a user a can interact with but I also have to remind myself that I should stick with my initial idea as well. This week was definitely taught me something valuable, and that is that when you have an idea or something that you want to do, you should not shy away from it.

Week 12: Final Writing April 30

Hashtags for the Week: #confidence #progress #sitebuilt #organization

After last week and coming to the realization that I should stick with my original concept and not try to take out the interaction part I began to build my site. I have all of the data and visuals in mind ready to go, now it’s a matter of organizing everything to fit a specific look and continue to move forward. Given that this is something I’m planning on working with in the future I went ahead and purchased a domain and got of the logistics set out to where I can have this uploaded somewhere besides the IMA WP. I moved over my code and work onto a site that I would use to publish it all to the public later on as I continue to work on this. I still feel a bit lost on some parts of my project, however the biggest takeaway from this week is that I should focus on organization more if I want to be successful in moving forward with this research.