Lab Projects

Table of contents

• Links to Lab Reports:
• Planning your lab session
• Themes for this semester
• Instructions for carrying out the assignment
• How the assignment will be graded

Links to Lab Reports:

• Lab 1? (names)
• Lab 2? (names)
• Lab 3? (names)
• Lab 4 --- Jeff Claire Alan
• Lab 5 ---Cait Nick Vlad
• Team Awesomesauces Lab of Amazing Data ---Stobie, Jenn, Nate & Meg

Planning your lab session

You and only you will be responsible for planning all the details of the session, such as making sure you have the hardware and software required to run your session, installing it before class begins, running the lab, and dismantling the equipment and leaving the classroom the way you found it at the end. You may want to come up with a plan of which team member is going to be responsible for what. Your grade will be based partly on how smoothly the session goes.

Themes for this semester

Your labs should explore one of the following themes:

• Addiction
• Violence
• Race
• Gender
• Health

Instructions for carrying out the assignment

Before the lab session

1. Figure out what research area you are interested in (a particular game, behavior, environmental variable, design, etc.)
2. Conduct research to see what kind of similar studies have been conducted (you will need to provide a bibliography in your final report). Read and discuss with your team.
3. Come up with a research question. For instance: "What impact does sound have on the player's performance?" In this example, you would have your classmates play a game with the sound on first, and then off, and see if this impacts their score. Don't design a question that cannot be answered during the assigned time (80 minutes) and with the resources at your disposal.
4. Design and conduct any necessary research instruments (like surveys, interviews, etc.). For an example of an excellent project in another class involving videogames, see this.
5. Your lab session should have learning value, but it should also be fun!
6. Please design a lab that involves the maximum number of your classmates as possible, so that people are not just standing around doing nothing. It's OK to recruit your non-team members to help you observe and collect data.

During the lab session

1. Set up.
2. Give instructions (you may or may not want to disclose your research question, so as to avoid contamination of your data)
3. Conduct your session.
4. Observe and take notes (you may even want to video tape the session).
5. At the end, break down and clear the classroom.

After the lab session

Write a written report of about 1500 words. Your report should include the following:

1. Background (introduction; what is your experiment about?)
2. Research question.
3. Literature review (include the articles you consulted here).
4. Description of the experiment you designed.
5. Findings (what you observed during the session).
6. Conclusions (what you concluded as a result of conducting the experiment).

This report should be posted to the corresponding Lab Session page one week after the experiment.

You will then present a short summary of your lab during class (see Schedule) and answer any questions we may have about your results.

How the assignment will be graded

• Creativity (how interesting your research question is).
• Organization (how smoothly things go during the lab session).
• Clarity and learning value of the final written report and class presentation.

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