Week 11: Playtesting (Part 3?)

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! This week, I did not continue playtesting, contrary to the name of this post; if I had, I would probably be running into major time pressure right now, despite having a very good set of data to use.

What Did I Actually Do Then?

For the majority of this week, I conducted data analysis and worked on my presentation. My advisors proposed a number of ways to analyze the data that I had collected, in order to factor qualitative results into the quantitative conclusions. For example, after running a standard T-test comparing the baseline and treatment groups for each of the 5 games, I organized the data in different ways to account for unexpected player behavior, then ran more T-tests on subsets and processed versions of the data. 

Here’s a sample of the code I used to obtain my T-test results, courtesy of Jupyter Notebook:

Interestingly, running T-tests was not as simple and straightforward as I expected (“I’ll just need to write a few lines of code, right?”) I had forgotten that Jupyter Notebook requires a kernel to run the code, and that this kernel does not always work. After several “Kernel Unknown” errors and code that failed to run, I was finally able to complete all of my data analysis, which will be a key part of my presentation on Saturday.

The Actual Presentation

Besides working on the data analysis, I also finished making the slides for the presentation, with one slight problem: I had been under the impression that my presentation would be 20-30 minutes long, but I later learned that the maximum time allowed was 15 minutes. By then, I had already completed my whopping 26 slides, which I considered to be a “shorter” version of my presentation. Choosing which slides to omit will be a daunting task, since I had designed the presentation structure with every slide in mind. At least my game demo video isn’t very long…

Next Steps 

For the rest of this week, I will be rehearsing my presentation in a desperate attempt to shorten it (or master the art of speaking extremely quickly but coherently; that is, the art of turning my presentation into a rap song without making it sound like one. Maybe this is what the 9th grade AP Government rap assignment had been preparing me for all along.) If you attend my final presentation, you’ll find out whether I have succeeded in this somewhat ambitious endeavor. 

Thank you so much and see you either on Saturday or next week!