Wednesday Studio

Today was our first studio split up into our designated days. We had some administrivia at the start and with the upcoming restrictions by the government, we are no longer allowed access to the workshop. This makes things potentially a little harder but also wasn't unexpected. We still have access to the teaching team and their knowledge over the online platforms so we will make do with what we have. We discussed three different approaches that our team can take when building our project. We discussed this many times last week and we've agreed to all work on the same concept with same or similar sensors and all produce our own form of Emily. This means the large physical aspect of the project will easily be able to be worked on in our own houses but we can still work on programming and sharing tips and documentation on the online platforms.

Everyone in the studio then participated in reporting back to the rest of the studio about our progress as individuals and as a team and our concerns moving forward. It was really comforting to hear everyone else have the same concerns and that everyone will be in the same boat.

This issue of access to user groups was a concern that came up in the studio today. As our team is focusing on typical families in the house environment, we all have access to that (at this point, it's pretty much 24/7 access - which I guess is a positive to this lockdown).

Update on Progress

Our team seems to be on track with our progress. We haven't started our report yet but we have put our focus on our concept and research. We still have to complete the team section and I have yet to begin the individual part of the report.

I started to conduct some basic research on our concept and domain. One article would give me slightly more information that would then lead me to another article/topic. It even was just interesting to see what people had to say about negative reinforcement and the term cognitive dissonance. According to the Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, cognitive dissonance is

"a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what a person already knows or believes and new information or interpretation which contradicts prior knowledge or beliefs."

I also attempted to play around with Arduino but it failed miserably. I followed the instructions to attempt the first exercise but the board kept turning off whenever I plugged it all in. I don't quite know why but I will resume learning Arduino next week after the report. There looks like there's some pretty cool equipment within the Arduino though and I'm interested to see what more we can build with it.