Mike's Weekly Blog

1. What was planned?
Look over old study data and draft a paper for Sandbox 2009.

2. What was done?
I reorganized the old study data and tried to look for some patterns. I think the only way to write a significant paper from this data is to re-do all of the pre and post-test analysis as well. We need to give more than the qualitative differences between the games. A table with the learning gain effect sizes and the qualitative output might be interesting. The results do not need to be statistically significant if we publish all of the effect sizes.

3. Problems encountered?
It is hard to come up with the hypothesis for the paper. It is more of a report on stuff that we have done. It feels like the contribution is a little weak. We need to sell it higher, I've read too many papers that just end with "we think feedback is what makes games work."

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting)
I've been going over the XML datashop system. They did a good job of explaining how to use it and what the parts are, but the normal challenges of using other people's code apply.

5. What's planned for next week?
Start work on a "best practices for game studies" paper. Could analize the previous studies data again, I know some new techniques that could help find significant results.

6. Hours worked.
20