(2-24) Finishing the IRB

This week, I finalized the IRB form. I plan on submitting it this week. Developing the survey turned out to be harder than I expected because we have to ask many quantitative questions that would help identify trends. I initially missed a lot of these possible questions, such as their preferred platform to play games. Additionally, the phrasing of certain questions, such as questions involving game attitude, mattered ("video games" and "computer games" have different meanings that would affect the result of the surveys).

Additionally, I have spent some time working on the user experience of the application. Rather than simply having a blank screen with text, as I originally had so I could focus on functionality, I now have nice login and signup screens.

Next week, I plan on submitting the IRB, finalizing the look and feel of my application, ensuring my app looks nice on mobile, and continuing to implement the ERIC API.

(2-16) Surveys

This week, I finalized the survey questions required for the IRB application. There will be 2 surveys for students to take - one before, and one after.

The pre survey will contain questions involving game attitude. I believe this data will help find correlations involving system effectiveness to students who enjoy video games vs. students who do not.

The post survey will involve questions from the System Usability Scale, and the Technology Acceptance Model. These questions will aid in assessing the overall effectiveness of my system.

This week, I also tried to further the implementation of the Eric API. However, I ran into an issue involving the step in which the students grant my app privileges. When a student tries to log into the game server using their login credentials, it replies with "wrong username or password". This is most likely an issue with the data i'm sending to the game server's entry point, and the developer and I are currently working towards a solution.

My plan for this upcoming week is to submit the IRB and solve the ERIC API issue.

(2-6) Additional Help and the IRB

This week, I began filling out an IRB application. IRB stands for Institutional Review Board, and they're responsible for protecting human research subjects. Since the user study tied to this project involves humans, we fall under this category.

To apply, I have to fill out a few forms, and complete a course that will provide me with the necessary training required to preform a clean study.

Additionally, I have to learn how to make effective surveys to be given to participants before and after the test. I've been tasked to study the “System Usability Scale”, and the “Technology Acceptance Module” - two trainings that will help me accomplish this goal.

I also had to learn how to protect the anonymity of my participants. The difficulty arose when my advisor and I had to find a way to link a survey ID to a student - that way we can compare the data from one student before the test, and after. We came to the conclusion I personally would never have anything to do with the handling of this ID - my advisor will. All I will need to deal with is the accounts created by the user on my platform, and linking that account to a TCG account. We decided to worry about dynamically pulling student grade data later, for the teacher can manually issue rewards through the game server.

In terms of the ERIC API, I reached out to my advisor for help, for I came to the conclusion I lacked the knowledge required to understand the API (remote database management, encryption, etc.). After a few meetings, I feel I have enough footing to effectively begin implementing the API. All of the setup is completed, and all I have to do now is add users, and learn to pull the data for a particular user that I need.