Post 7/5-7/7

This week was short but jam packed. Over the weekend I redid my wireframe of the app Meagan and I are trying to create. On Wednesday we met with Anna and discussed our wireframes and wrote our features on the whiteboard. It was super helpful to walk through both of our ideas to see what features we liked from each other. On Thursday we worked together to create a wireframe that incorporated both of our ideas. I think the app has the potential to benefit many people. Today we sat in on an interview with Anna as she interviewed one of our participants. It was a very detailed interview and we got a lot of useful information and things to consider as we continue to iterate over our app.

Here is a link to a slide show explaining our app/ the storyboard of our video: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1huqGLouxKOKGHGrjp6lHJkJtxs_6adCALgoUvyJ7cJI/edit?usp=sharing

On Friday I did my lightning talk. I am not the best presenter in the world, but I try. It was fun to listen to everyone give their lightning talks because it helped me to gain a better understanding of their projects. Before I started to create my lightning talk I met with Anna to discuss what important features I should highlight. She said that making the problem I was addressing clear was key. Letting the audience know the methods we used was also important, as was trying to sum up the results in a clean way. I wanted to talk about why working on a topic related to grief is important, what problem we were trying to solve, how we did it, what we found, and where to go from there. I was essentially trying to make a summed up version of the paper Meagan and I are writing. I made a basic outline for the slide show and labeled each slide with the topic to focus on. I then added some information and that was that. I practiced my talk with Meagan to make sure I was under one minute and she practiced hers for me as well. Because I was over one minute I went back to see where I could cut certain things out but still make sure the presentation flowed. I decided that it was best to cut out a lot of the detail on how we coded and interviewed by briefly mentioning them. I figured that if I ran through it but then kept the slide where I mentioned some of the important themes we found in the data things would even out.

Here is a link to my lightning talk: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lBGUl8JpWEktkYU5Hi0f6F8V7VKwCO29momcKn70VTc/edit?usp=sharing

In regard to our poster, Meagan had some really cool ideas about how to design the poster. We want to be different but we do not want our poster to distract from the importance of our work. Here is a rough idea of how we want to organize the poster. We have chosen a nice color pallet to go along with our poster. It is not present in the picture since we have had some discussions about how we can improve the awesome base Meagan made. Meagan and I had a google hangout meeting with Anna later on Wednesday night and she showed us one of her previous REU posters. We went through the things that worked and some things the could be improved. I do not have a picture of her poster to share since we were having an online meeting and she was showing us what was on her screen.

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Overall, I would say our meetings with Anna are going very well. Meagan and I are getting into the phase where we get to create our app so we have more freedom to try new things. Anna is always willing to meet with us and look at what we have been working on. We have a meeting with Patrick on Monday to tell him everything we’ve been working on this past week. We spoke to him briefly on Thursday when we were making our slide for the Friday meeting, but the meeting we will have on Monday will be more in-depth.