Week 1

To begin week 1 I arrived on campus and got settled in. I made sure to know where the building was before I had to be there, so I would not be late. I met my mentor, Professor Leilah Lyons, and she explained to me the entire EcoCollage project that I would be apart of. (Explained on the homepage) I also talked to Tia, the main graduate student in which I would be working closely with, and she informed me on the tasks I had at hand. For my first week she wanted me to get used to the different programs that I would be using, breaking and fixing code, and seeing what my skill set exactly was. Personally I wasn't ready to code, nor did I have the true desire to do so. However, the entire project as a whole was very interesting. The virtual graphics, experimentation, gaming designs, and so on were all very interesting. 

Once Tia would leave during lunchtime, I then began to learn how to transcribe videos. Watching a group of students experiment with the prototype game board, I had to write the times when they began speaking, what "color" had spoken, what they said, and the ending time of their sentence. These segments were about 12 minutes long and took normally two to three hours to transcribe. These were very tedious and frustrating, but it still beats coding for me.

Within the first week I'd say the program I learned the most about was InqScribe. Different ways I could set shortcuts, the best ways to hear a person speak, listening to different play rates (faster or slower), and for some amusement I'd make them repeat over and over what they had said and put it into a little song like version. I also had to work with xCode, which had Java Script in it. Coding, once again is not my favorite thing to do, but the application that we had downloaded opened an iPhone on screen and ran a simulation exactly like an iPhone. I had to click an app to open it, hold it to make them all shake so that they could be deleted, and could even close the running apps. Although very interesting, I still had to look into the developed code and try to see what the pieces did. She told me that I should explore and be able to break and fix the different code segments. I was definitely lost and am glad I could transcribe videos, no matter how time consuming these were.

Working with Program xCode

• Learning the different coding techniques
• Learning what's possible to create with xCode
• Learning what controls what

Working with Program InqScribe

• Transcribe Videos
• Watch Student's reactions to Garden placement
• Learn the strategies of the students
• Do students grasp the concept of the placement?