We’re back in the lab. 

Quick little recap of the long weekend: 

On Friday, we didn’t do much until night time. Harrison taught Rodney, Ruby, and I had to play a card game called spades. I enjoyed it. You had to play in teams, but it’s not really playing in teams because you sit across from them and you’re not allowed to talk. You just need really suggestive facial expressions?

On Saturday, Angelic had to deal with something at a bank near Des Moines, so we decided to just make a trip out of it and go to the Des Moines farmers market. Unfortunately, by the time we got downtown, the market was about to close. On the bright side, I was able to find some tomatoes and zucchini, so I’m looking forward to using them for my dinners. After the market, we walked to check out the state capital. The colors and architecture of the building was so pretty. Later in the day, Kate and Anjali took Chu-Chu, Andrea, Alee, and me out to dinner as a celebration for finishing deeper dives. It was fun to hang out with everyone outside of the lab and eat some good food.

I spent my Sunday morning outside – I went for a long walk around campus, and then sat outside in the sun and made some more beaded bracelets. I superglued the knots this time so they don’t break like the last two have :(. In the afternoon, Sophie, Harrison, and I tried to tightening our literature review outline. We haven’t had time to write the draft yet because of everything going on, and just being pooped, but I feel a lot better about it now. Aron invited us over to his house for dinner Sunday night, which was a lot of fun. His family was so nice and welcoming, and the food was amazing. After eating, we played some basketball and volleyball inside and then went inside to play MarioKart for a while. I think I’m finally getting the hang of playing on the switch, so watch out.

Yesterday was our first day not having class outside of the normal craft of research session. At 9, we met with Yvonne to talk about poster presentations, and start thinking about what kinds of things we want to put onto our research poster. We had 15 minutes to create a 3 minute “elevator pitch” about our research title, methods, results, discussion, and future work. This process of putting together everything we’ve learned so far, and verbalizing our thoughts was really helpful because it helped me understand our project better, and also made me realize how many questions I had. After the class, Aron came to the lab to talk with us about a lot of stuff. Each of us had a lot of questions for him regarding our lit review, the goals that we can achieve by the end of the summer, programming, etc.. I feel like the research goal is much clearer after meeting with Aron because I understand how our study for the summer adds to what other researchers have been working on and why the communication between the VR HMD and the Muse 2 EEG device will offer significant differences from what we’ve been doing in the EEG lab. In the afternoon, Harrison and I spent a few hours working on MatLab to analyze the data we collected in the EEG lab…we weren’t having much luck and just getting a little loopy, so we had to call it a night. 

Today, Harrison and I got right back into working on MatLab. We asked Eliot for a little help, and he was able to guide our approach to solving our problem. Turns out, the scripts we were using could not process the file type that we had because, while they both came from .edf files, the scripts were for 32-bit files, but the file type we have is 24-bit (strange). We found a different method to analyze the data though, and Aron says the output we got looks promising. At 10, we had a really engaging ethics class with Eliot, and then Merate Brakat came to talk with us about her research for the lunch and lecture. 

After lunch, Harrison, Sophie, and I went to the EEG lab to run another trivia experiment with the 64-electrode cap, and tonight, we’re going to start our lit review draft.

Questions for other groups about their mini poster presentations from yesterday: 

• Comm heat: How do you plan to analyze how effective the app will be in different populations?
• Stem XR: Do you expect some students to have a hard time learning the information on top of learning how to use and maneuver in VR, and how would you handle this?