William Reflection

Week 1

During the first week, I was introduced to the subject and got to know my other group members. We had a meeting that same week and discussed potential ideas for the social robot project. We were especially interested in doing something with the NAO Robot and also discussed the different symptoms of PwDs as mentioned in the course literature. As a group we agreed on focusing on one specific symptom and how the social robot could help counteract this symptom from further development. In essence, we wanted to keep it simple.

Week 2

In the second week, we began looking at the process of detailing the project in the xWiki. At this point, we had decided to focus on the memory loss symptom of the PwD, and our solution became to create what we dubbed the "Personal Encyclopedia". We also had lectures that taught us the process by which SCE projects are done, by way of Mark's project with childhood diabetes. We incorporated these ideas into our xWiki and divided work between group members. I developed the personas and problem scenarios in the xWiki.

Week 3

In Week 3 we started work on the midterm presentation as a way to catch us up to speed with what we wanted to communicate to Mark, Frank, and other groups. By structuring the presentation, it became clear to us what areas of the project were defined and which areas were still untouched. We made storyboards of the different problem scenarios, which would become our use cases, and defined the three phases of the system. 

Week 4 

Rixt, Pravesha and I held the midterm presentation. I did not prepare my talking points well enough and was not happy with my performance, as an assured tone goes a long way to understand the material, not only for the audience but also for myself -- after the presentation I felt the whole project was on unstable ground and spent the afternoon brainstorming further narrowing down in specific directions. We'd received some feedback that to me suggested we were on the wrong track entirely but was convinced by the group that we simply don't know yet how to communicate our ideas clearly enough -- we're only halfway there.

Similar projects I've worked on have had a similar moment -- a recalibration where I take a step back and look at the project as a whole -- to make sense of what it is I'm working on, I need to explain it to myself. Some of the work I did that day was quite illuminating: for example, I wrote example conversations between the PwD and NAO, and thought about the functions the system should have. Often what I think is a step back is actually a step forward, cheesy as that sounds. 

Week 5

More work on the xWiki and started looking at implementation with Diederik. We spent time testing the efficacy of Robots in de Klas (RidK) and then investigated alternate ways, like the Social Robotics library for python. We never got it working so decided to hard code a database in RidK. I made a rudimentary database in Google Sheets. As for the xWiki, 

Week 6

finalising evaluation plan & database, switching to gpt, planning pilot study

Week 7

pilot study, evaluation, documenting the evaluation with pictures and videos, , tidied up xWiki

Week 8

Final presentation, planned final xWiki runthrough by creating google document with notes for each page. Conditions for a good xWiki included: --