Week 7!

It’s crunch-time! With only three weeks left, I was a bit worried about the outcome of our project. However, we got a lot accomplished this week and I’m feeling less stressed out about having only 3 weeks of work time left. Here’s how my week went!

Over the Weekend: Finally, we submitted to Facebook! I created and formatted a logo for our application, sent in the videos of our mockup, and created a privacy policy for Facebook to view (http://cgi.sice.indiana.edu/~gkbastin/). Sadly we did not get accepted, but no big deal because we won’t need the user data until the app is actually developed and deployed in a user-study. And now we know exactly what we need to improve to get accepted.

Monday: Fourth of July! Took the day off 🙂

Tuesday: Today was a caffeine-fueled productive day. I started by printing out our paper and taking a pen to it for about 2 hours, scanning it over, adding citations, rearranging things and finding embarrassing grammar issues. I also implemented the errors found by the past two weeks of peer reviews into the paper and made sure they were addressed. I am loving the way our paper is turning out. Read it here yourself: 2017CHI_BastinPereira_RareDiseaseFacebookApp (2)

Wednesday: At 9am, we met with Patrick and Fernando for our weekly meeting. Here, we went over a draft of survey questions and decided how we would format the survey, what groups we would distribute it to, etc. We decided to post to rare disease Facebook groups that already exist, and create the survey online in Google forms so everyone would only have to click a link to properly access it and respond. We decided the format of the survey should be as followed: the beginning would have general questions whose responses developed a sense of what types of support were those in the rare disease currently lacking, along with where they currently received support. After asking that, we decided to delve deeper into the scenarios, explaining that each one symbolized a different mechanism of an application. We then asked questions referring to the scenarios to evaluate whether they thought it was beneficial for an application in the rare disease community. We also put together our lightning talk for Friday’s Pro-Health Tea.

Thursday: Thursday was a sick day, so not much was accomplished. However I finalized the survey more, and started looking at color schemes and an overall idea of how our poster should look. Here’s a link to our poster:

Also, we have to make a short film at the end of our 10 weeks of REU to show what it was like. As my brother is excellent at filming and loves to do that kind of thing, I requested his help in coming up with ideas of what should be in the short movie. I decided that I should discuss the overall process as well as introducing my project, specifically the challenges/failures we encountered along the way and how we defeated those obstacles.

Friday: I woke up early to finish writing this blog (hehe), and checked over some email. The pro-health meeting was at 10AM, and afterwards I devoted the day to memorizing my lightning talk speech and putting together a draft poster and storyboard. Over the weekend, I plan on inserting more corrections into our paper before submitting it to Github on Monday. Also, I plan on distributing our survey to multiple rare disease Facebook populations (thanks to Haley MacLeod). Our group (Me, Vanessa, Fernando, and Patrick) met again at 2PM to go over our official survey and make last minute corrections. Also, we discussed what edits our paper may need, etc. The Pro-Health Tea started at 3PM, and all of the groups in Pro-Health gave a short, 1-minute powerpoint presentation and lightning talk.