Week 8: Vetting, Videos, and Validation

Welcome back to Week 8 of my Senior Project! As mentioned last week, this week started with me sending the course to some teachers for their feedback. While I waited to hear back, I also ran some peer testing on my own.

Progress

I started the week by having a friend work through the course while I observed, allowing me to identify any areas of confusion and make improvements along the way. These were usually minor changes that either added clarification or reworded sentences to make instructions clearer.

However, quite often, I found them asking me how to do a certain Desmos Implementation when it’s explained in the next sentence. This might be an issue with how I phrase instructions, writing the general instructions first and then how specifically it’s implemented. For example, the lesson would ask them to write a function using a summation, but the way to insert a summation into Desmos is only provided in the next sentence. I decided not to change that format, as users will naturally read the next sentence for guidance when working independently. However, that may change if more users have the same issue.

Following along with someone new to Desmos also revealed a more significant oversight. When they were asked to add the “Ticker” to their graph, I realized that I was missing from their interface. The Ticker is essential for much of the course, so this was a major issue. After some digging, I discovered that the Ticker is part of Desmos’s advanced features, which are turned off by default. While I updated the lesson to include a guide on enabling advanced features, I realized that the Desmos implementation itself is still too confusing for users.

To address this, I decided to record videos showcasing the Desmos Implementation for each lesson that the users can reference. This is not to be confused with the video lessons I said I wanted to make last week’s blog. These videos don’t have commentary and purely showcase what to write in Desmos to create the lesson objectives.

Revisions

Along with the minor rewrites from the peer testing, I also rewrote a portion of the “Logistic Regression and Classification” lesson. This continues the trend of the past few weeks of interweaving the Desmos Implementation into the main course contents. Keep an eye on any lesson that still has the “Desmos Implementation” subheading, as those will likely also be changed in the near future to accommodate that shift in philosophy.

Overall, week 8 has been focused on getting feedback and making small but impactful changes that improve the clarity of the course.

While I’m writing this, I’m just getting back the first of my teacher feedback, so see you all next week as I continue these revisions and finalize the course.