Katie's Update January 14

Happy New Year!!!!!!

This is the first post for 2010. This semester I will be continuing my work on Snag'Em and assisting in technical details with the game as well as helping to run the study. However, I'll also be moving in a slightly different direction towards developing mobile, collaborative, location based games for exercise and/or team building purposes. World of Workout is the first such game and will be improved and studied to better integrate with the Snag'Em goals. Other games will include a campus-based version of high-tech tag, and a tech based scavenger hunt modeled after the childhood game of Hot/Cold.

Semester goals:

• Develop a functional Facebook App for use with the main Snag'Em game
• Develop a functional iPhone App for use with the main Snag'Em game
• Finish development of World of Workout and complete a control study on the game
• Begin development of location-based games utilizing GPS features in mobile devices as well as RFID, integrate some of these features into Snag'Em and World of Workout

For the sake of being concise in my titles, I am going to restart numbering at Week One for this Spring Semester. As always, this blog will be updated on a weekly basis. Creation and deployment of a more complex website which will put greater emphasis on the above projects will also occur this semester!

What did you do?

• Discussed plans for the Snag'Em study, formulated ideas for recruitment and retention within the game
• Made plans for the future of World of Workout
• Determined my role for this semester on the CREU project

What problems did you encounter?

• Recruitment for the study is more difficult than expected...we're each utilizing all of our resources in order to help get as many people as possible playing.
• It's going to be a busy semester, already we are experience time conflicts for meetings
• Paper deadlines are rapidly approaching, we'll need results soon in order to be considered for many conferences this spring/summer

What do you plan to do next week?

• IRB for World of Workout
• Improvements to World of Workout
• Research and Planning for location based games
• Resolve open tickets in Assembla
• Recruit as many "snaggers" as possible
• Finish papers for ITiCSE (1/15/10)

How many hours did you work?
~5