Week 9: Motivation and Chords

Hello everyone! This week, I focused on quantifying and transferring my motivation data into a graph while continuing to host keyboard sessions. 

To start, I continued hosting more piano keyboard sessions with my participants. Like last week, I had each participant play simple songs and piano exercises on the keyboard. While they played, I noted their expressions and behavior, the number of times they completed, replayed, or restarted a song, and the time it took them to complete a song without mistakes. The only thing different from last week’s session was that I had the participants use both their left and right hands to play a song.

This adjustment made the keyboard sessions more challenging for the participants, especially since the majority of them are new to playing the piano. Though before introducing these two-handed song and exercises, I had each participant replay the same songs and exercises from their first session (refer back to my week 8 blog post). This not only allowed me to observe whether they had improved in speed and confidence while playing, but also gave the participants a chance to warm up before attempting the new pieces.

Other than the keyboard sessions, I also started quantifying and transferring my gameplay motivation data into a graph. Unlike the gameplay data (refer back to my week 6 and 7 blog posts), I had a much easier time transferring my motivation data into a graph. After transferring my data into multiple different graphs, I ended up sticking with the bar graph because it clearly displayed changes in participant motivation. 

Additionally, I made another key to track motivation during the keyboard sessions (refer back to my week 5 blog post). Similar to how I tracked the gameplay session’s motivation, this key assigns numeric values to specific behaviors and expressions I notice the participants make. This allows me to quantify the participant’s motivation and makes it easier for me to track. 

For next week, I plan to continue hosting keyboard sessions while beginning to design the prototype keyboard controller.