Week 10: Final Session, Final Graphs, and Final Presentation.

Hello everyone! This week officially marks the end of the experimental phase of my senior project!

The final keyboard session was, for the most part, identical to the previous two sessions. I had each participant play songs and piano exercises on the keyboard piano. While they played, I tracked their learning progress and noted their expressions and behaviors to track their motivation (refer to my week 8 and 9 blog posts). 

However, there was an added challenge to this final session that made it different from the previous sessions. I added two new challenging pieces to the study. One new exercise, and one new song. These additions require bimanual hand coordination (refer to my proposal).

These added pieces made the sessions more challenging for the participants. However, it also allowed them to get used to playing with both hands! Of course, before allowing the participants to attempt these new pieces, I had them each replay the same songs and exercises from their first and second sessions (refer back to my week 8 and 9 blog posts). Again, this gave the participants a chance to warm up before attempting the new pieces and allowed me to observe whether they had improved in speed and confidence as they played. 

Before moving on, I want to once again give my thanks to Ms. Klares, my faculty advisor, for composing all the songs and exercises used during the keyboard sessions! 

After finally collecting all my data (i.e., keyboard learning progress and motivation data), I began transferring them into graphs. Like the gameplay motivation data (refer to my week 9 blog post), I converted my keyboard motivation data into a bar graph, as it clearly displayed changes in participant motivation.

Everything went smoothly until I had to transfer the keyboard learning progress data into a graph. To put it in short, after fighting Google Sheets and Canva for hours, yet again, I was able to successfully convert the learning progress data into a row graph. I chose this graph because it clearly showed each participant’s progress over time. For example, it showed how a participant spent 5 minutes on a song in the first session, yet later spent 5 seconds in their second session.

As the title suggests, I also worked on my senior project final presentation. I added all my graphs and two keys (refer to my week 5 and 9 blog posts), worked on animating my slides, talked about my methodology, added to my long list of struggles/errors, wrote about future research steps, expanded on my conclusion, reminisced about my internship experience, etc. I was making sure that I wasn’t missing anything important, yet I wasn’t yapping away in my presentation.

Finally, I also began working on my final product: a design of a prototype piano-like controller. Well, kind of. I began researching how other prototype gaming controllers’ blueprints were made and designed. Specifically, I was analysing how the blueprint of the guitar-like controller from Guitar Hero was structured. After all, I didn’t want to miss anything while designing my piano-like controller. In Guitar Hero’s blueprints, they laid out two important details: (1) the controller’s appearance and (2) the function of each key, button, or switch on the controller. This was extremely helpful as it gave me a guide on how I should create my final product. 

For next week, I plan to continue working on my final product while practicing for my senior project final presentation!