Week 3...we start research!

This week we wanted to start doing research about the problems that Access Lecture is hoping to address, so we didn't do a whole lot of coding. To get a better idea of what math and science courses are like at different education levels we contacted a bunch of our former teachers and professors and scheduled interviews with them.  For the professors we're going to be conducting interviews in person, but for middle school and high school teachers we're mostly going to have to communicate over the phone or through e-mail due to location issues.

We tried to e-mail 2-4 people for each category of courses we're focusing on, and for each level of education.  We were able to find a lot of professors and high school teachers that were willing to let us interview them, and a couple of middle school teachers.  In total we've contacted 16 teachers/professors and have already heard back from 9 of them.

We developed two sets of interview questions, one for college professors and one for high school and middle school teachers. The learning environment is very different in college than it was in high school and middle school (both of which used pretty similar presentation methods) and so it's important to distinguish between the two.  If we only took one into consideration, we'd only be able to develop software that would meet the needs of that one group of students, whereas we want Access Lecture to be effective for students with varying degrees of education.  If it works for college students, that's wonderful but if it doesn't help middle school students too then I don't think we've done the project justice.

We have multiple interviews lined up for next week, and we'll also be starting to write a survey for students with visual impairments so that we can start gathering some information from the actual intended audience for the software.  This week we looked a little bit into how to develop a good survey (i.e. what sorts of questions are best for the information you want to gather,  how to not write leading questions, etc). Abhishek got through most of the material we had on survey making, and Alex and I were able to get through a good amount of it, so hopefully next week we can update you guys on that as well as the progress of our interviews.

Lindsey