7/8/24- Ruby – SPIRE-EIT 2024

This weekend was a lot of fun! Because of the 4th of July, we got a 4 day weekend which was much needed at this point! Wednesday night, we went to the Ames fireworks display as a group and had an intern from another program, Max, join us. We had fun exploring the area around the stadium afterwards as well. On Thursday, we saw Inside Out 2 in the movies (which was great) and got dinner at Ichiban (which was also great). At night we hung out and did some sparklers in the parking lot! Friday was a slow day, but I enjoyed having no commitments and getting to chat with some of my friends from home. I made banana nut muffins, choc chip muffins, and cheddar garlic biscuits. Saturday, some of us went to downtown Des Moines to visit the farmers market for a little bit and explore the state capital. I got a bundle of sunflowers from the farmers market, but we didn’t have a lot of time to explore so that’s all I got. I think we will try to go back again next weekend. The Iowa state capitol was really impressive and we took some cute pictures by it. Sunday, we all did our own stuff and one of the other groups went out to dinner with their grad mentor. Rodney made a nice homemade dinner with Andrea and Alee’s help. We didn’t really do much the rest of the night, so I got all of my homework done and made more banana bread.

This morning, we had a Craft of Research session where we talked about presenting posters and elevator speeches. I thought it was interesting hearing from the other groups. We were asked to come up with questions for the other groups. For StemXR: How will you measure the effectiveness of your game in engaging the students? Will it be qualitative or quantitative methods? For CuriosityEEG: How is the Muse headband different from the traditional EEG? Do you get the same quality of data or is there a trade off in quality for the portability of the headband?

Today, we have meetings and work time with our project groups.

Here is a picture from the 4th of July: