After writing yesterday, we had a project meeting. Everyone involved on the project was there. The REU interns prepared some research articles to summarize and discuss that were about the World in Miniature (WiM) idea. The group discussed it, and Jon told us that we had to determine the main questions that the study would intend to answer, if we were to go with that idea. After more discussion, we went with the navigation based on an avatar idea. I feel relieved to have finally decided on a direction for our project. I think that our group encountered some difficulty with choosing an idea because we didn’t have any experience working together, and we gravitated towards different ideas and, in the end, we had to choose one or another. I wonder if this is how research topics are usually determined, or if this situation was unique to our project. I think this would be an interesting question to ask the faculty or grad students.

Lucia, our grad mentor for our project, scheduled a one-on-one with me after the project meeting. We went to the atrium to talk. She asked me how I thought the project was going, and how I can be best supported according to my academic/career interests. I asked to clarify more about what would have to be done for the research, and I listened to her as she suggested ways that I can frame this research experience as being helpful to me in the future. I feel so fortunate as to receive this kind of support and guidance from her.

Later on, Abby led a Craft of Research session. We got together in our project teams and worked on our Materials and Methods sections. I found this activity helpful because now I have some content questions for Lucia and Jon, which should help us better write our Materials and Methods later on.

We had another Unity class this morning. I followed my advice from yesterday and tried to better understand how the code connected to Unity. I asked many questions and got help when I was stuck, which happened often. However, I’m hoping to learn enough Unity to contribute to the Teleport project. Soon, we can start getting an idea of what we have to learn in Unity to finish the experiment tasks.