Dissertation: Calendar, Work Plan & Log

The following calendar shows the intended scheme of work for BSc (Hons) Information Technology Dissertation. This enables progress to be tracked and milestones logged.

It is intended that this post will be continually updated when work is done towards the project so that everything is in one place. Similarly, there will also be further posts, each concerning one aspect of the work, which will also be living documents e.g. bibliography, meetings with supervisor etc.

Log of Work Completed

Sunday, 27th January 2008:

With exams over, made a start on the written work and re-wrote the introduction which is less words and somewhat more impersonal than the interim report version. It is difficult though to entirely detach all personal references given the reason for the choice of subject. I will have to check with Dave that the use of terms such as 'my' is OK. Also, finally managed to get the Google calendar set to 'shared' so that I could embed it in this post!

Monday, 28th January 2008:

Finished the introduction by writing aims, goals and scope of the investigation. I have also added more blog posts to track meetings with my supervisor and a post dedicated to a bibliography.

I've registered with a free online survey hosting company for students called: Thesis Tools which looks promising - if I get the time to use an online survey. This kind of tool would make a web based survey possible and will be seriously considered if I have some guaranteed results from a supervised survey of college students. If successful, it would also have the advantage of reaching a wider demographic and therefore the possibility of receiving a greater value of data.

This gets me pretty much up to date. The introduction should have been finished by 11th January, but with Christmas, assignments due on the 18th January and exams the following week it proved to be too much. The calendar above shows that the literature review was due to start this weekend so I am pretty much on track at this point.

Wednesday, 6th February 2008:

Started making notes on Questionnaires and Survey design from Oppenheim (1992)

Thursday, 7th February 2008:

Continued and finished Oppenheim (1992) notes. Also looked at Colorado State University guidelines on survey research.

Friday, 8th February 2008:

Wrote notes from 'Questionnaire Design' (Hague 1993). This book is considerably more basic than the Oppenheim text but useful nonetheless.

Saturday, 9th February 2008:

Wrote notes from 'Designing Surveys' (Czaja & Blair 1996). This book is much more in depth than Hague's but I found it easier to read than Oppenheim's.

Sunday, 17th February 2008:

I've been researching emerging technologies which could be used in the future of gaming. I'm especially impressed by Excitim's Dream-Technology which allows people with physical disabilities to use remote-control cars and PlayStations. It employs motion detection in a baseball cap (or a wand type device) to interact with a modified PlayStation controller. They also have other devices for controlling PC applications, email and the internet etc. Great stuff.

Monday, 18th February 2008:

This morning was spent researching technologies from the 2008 CES in Las Vegas. Especially fun is the Optimus Maximus Keyboard but I have also looked at OLED displays.

Tuesday, 19th February 2008:

Continued with the emerging technologies review, looking at multi-touch interfaces.

Tuesday, 26th February 2008:

Phew! Busy day. I started out by looking more at multi-touch tecnologies such as Jeff Han's, how the iPod touch/iPhone works (played on an iPod touch on Saturday - must have one), Microsoft's Touchlight and Surfae products and the MERL (Mitsubishi) DiamondTouch. I've watched quite a few product demo videos on YouTube today. Possibly the most relevant is a demo of Mitsubishi's DiamondTouch being used to play Warcraft III. It uses both touch and audio commands - very nice demonstartion of what is possible if the hardware was readily affodable. The video is on another post labelled 'HCI'.

Anyway, this led me to Bill Buxton who pretty much pioneered this sort of technology in the 1980s [ref?]. I started reading about Gesture interfaces and looking at the whole HCI aspect arround that. It is linked to concepts such as chunking - especially when used with speech. This is the direction I now need to get more involved with as I write the literature review. I can then get on to evaluation techniques - hopefully soon.

I also joined a Facebook group called "Why Multi Touch Technology will Change The World". I'm not entirely convinced it will and should remain unbiased but it certainly shows a lot of promise. Anyway, this led me to a lady called Lynn Marentette who publishes several blogs and is interested in "...how technology can support intervention & prevention efforts in health, mental health, and related fields." As I said, phew. So much to be getting on with but I must try and get back to gaming!

Saturday 29th March, 2008:

It's been a month since my last post! This doesn't mean that I haven't done anything although there has been too much time spent on a Corporate Strategy assignment which took much longer than I anticipated. There was also a Project Management presentation to do last week. These are all done now and there are just three things to concentrate on: Dissertation, Evolving Internet Technologies research paper and Project Management Exam. Phew! There is a considerable amount of cross-over with the Evolving Web Tech module and the future technologies for the dissertation so two birds with one stone and all that...

In the past month, i've also done some more research into methodologies for evaluating input devices and it increasingly looks like a lost cause which can really only be done with questionnaires and observations. Talking of which, last weekend (Easter) was spent devising a pilot survey which was then issued to four people for a test run. I chose people of a similar age to those that will be surveyed in the main work. Three are currently final year students (two are also tutors) and one was a fellow student last year. They were chosen because they are all enthusiastic gamers, have different preferences for the type of games that they play and are all in a position to give some constructive feedback with regards to the design of the pilot survey.

This weekend will be spent looking at the results of the pilot survey, creating a 'question by question' analysis of the pilot work and redesigning the questionnaire where necessary. This is because I have arranged to administer the final survey to two groups of students on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. The other problem that I have just realised needs sorting out quickly is how exactly I am going to analyse the data? Excel is obviously the best bet but I've never used it for much more complicated than little graphs and big long lists (flat DB's in another life in a warehouse!). Better get cracking then! This really had to be done before the two week break from college which starts on the 7th April. Although the survey is a couple of weeks behind, at least this will be achieved.

By coincidence, there just happens to be an Xbox 360 tournament running at college on the Tuesday (April Fools Day so yet TBC!!). If so it would be good to go and try to get a few more participants. Even better would be to have an online version of the survey so I could just go and hand out leaflets which link to it - this may not get as many respondents but would take a lot less time (which is better?).

I should have more to write really soon then...

Thursday 3rd April, 2008:

The weekend was spent producing a question by question analysis of the pilot work and devloping the final questionnaire on that analysis. This week I have issued questionnaires around college. There was a charity gaming event taking place so I tried to get some respondents from there but found it difficult to get people's attention for the 10 minutes required.

Thursday 22nd May, 2008:

OK, so there's a bit of a gap, but I've been really busy! The dissertation report went to print & binding with the final title of 'Video Game Interaction: A Survey of User Opinion'. Including appendices it weiged in at around 33,000 words. I had to be quite brutal with the final editing to make the word count but I think that's a good thing as it ensures there is no waffle and every paragrapgh says something.

In the last week I have also had to write a 5,000 word report for the 'Evolving Internet Technologies' module as well as prepare the dissertation presentation - little sleep and much worrying has been achieved, but it's not meant to be easy I suppose! Most of the leg work for the report has been done and there is some crossover with previous studies including the dissertation e.g. Augmented and Virtual Realities and tangible interfaces.

Today saw me present my work and findings to the tutors and some students. I went on a bit as I have so much to say and had to rush through some of the results but this is preferable (for me) to drying up and not having anything to say. As usual I had my comfort blanket in the form of notes but only used them for stats - so that was a plus. The tutors seemed to be reasonably interested and I thought I fielded questions pretty well. Only Andy got me on one question which I had to own up to. I never thought of comparing my results to other surveys which have been carried out although I did look for some to get an idea about format and subject. The problem is that so many survey are performed for commercial purposes and access to them costs money - something which I don't have...poor student, rising fuel, electric, gas and food prices, blah, blah, whinge...

Anyway, that's that and apart from the Project Management exam I'm just awaiting my results although feedback suggests that everything is OK...fingers crossed.