Week 8: Keyboard Sessions!

Hello everyone! This week, we are officially transitioning to the keyboard sessions!

Now that AP exams are coming to a close and more participants are available, I can move forward with my research! However, before I talk more about the keyboard sessions, I want to briefly talk about what I worked on this week. 

To start, I met up with my on-site advisor, Basel Hussein, to discuss trends that were appearing in my finger and hand coordination data. So far, there’s a trend where the participant’s last session results fall between the results of their first and second session. At least that’s the case for the seniors, since they were able to complete 3 rhythm game gameplay sessions. 

To clarify, in their first gameplay session, each participant picked a low difficulty level between 5 – 18 and scored in the 70% – 99% accuracy percentage. However, in their second session, each participant challenged themselves by picking a difficulty level between 11- 31 and scored in the 50% – 96% accuracy percentage. By their last session, each participant picked a difficulty level between 15 – 20 and scored in the 69% – 98% accuracy percentage. 

In addition to discussing the data, Basel also taught me how to use Google Sheets due to my dilemma from last week.

The very next day, I met with my faculty advisor, Ms. Klares, to finalize preparations for the first keyboard session. We discussed the structure and the goals that I hoped the participant would achieve by the end of the session. Also, HUGE thanks to Ms. Klares for creating the simple piano exercises and beginner songs for the participants to play during the keyboard session!! Not to mention, the hand placement and keys that the participants must know in order to play on the keyboard. These were extremely helpful as these allowed the participants to focus on learning basic keyboard movements and coordination without being too overwhelmed. 

Now for the keyboard sessions!

By the second-half of the week, I had the participants play on a keyboard piano. Similar to the gameplay sessions, I continued tracking participants’ motivation by observing their expressions and behavior throughout the activity. Though, I also noted how many times the participants repeated a song for practice to evaluate their motivation. 

As for tracking the participants’ finger and hand coordination, instead of continuing to track it by the number of taps they receive, like I did with the rhythm game Project Sekai: Colorful Stage (PJSK) (refer to my week 4, 5, 6 blog posts), I measured how long it took the participants to complete each beginner song. This allowed me to measure the participants’ progress in learning the keyboard over time.

For next week, I plan to continue hosting keyboard sessions while transferring my motivation data into a graph.