The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Tag archives for eye-tracking

What’s the Bleeding Edge for Museums?

Last week, I talked about our eye-tracking in the science center at the Museums and the Web 2013 conference, as part of a track on Evaluating the Museum. This was the first time I’d attended this conference, and it turned out to be very different from others I’d attended. This, I think, meant that eye-tracking [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Entering the home stretch

I have just about nailed down a defense date. That means I have about two months to wrap all this up (or warp it, as I originally typed) into a coherent, cohesive, narrative worthy of a doctoral degree. It’s amazing to me to think it might actually be done one of these days. Of course, [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Analyze this

And now it comes to this: thesis data analysis. I am doing both qualitative analysis of the interviews and quantitative analysis for the eye-tracking, mostly. However, I will also quantify some of the interview coding and “qualify” the eye-tracking data, mainly while I analyze the paths and orders in which people view the images. So [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Data collecting … across the universe*

Or at least across the globe, for now. One of the major goals of this project is building a platform that is mobile, both around the science center and beyond. So as I travel this holiday season, I’ll be testing some of these tools on the road, as we prepare for visiting scholars. We want [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

One Month’s Worth

How much progress have I made on my thesis in the last month? Since last I posted about my thesis, I have completed the majority of my interviews. Out of 30 I need, I have all but four completed, and three of the four remaining scheduled. Out of about 20 eyetracking sessions, I have completed [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Triangulation and timelines

After clinical interviews and eye-tracking with my expert and novice subjects, I’m hoping to do a small pilot test of about 3 of the subjects in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. I’m headed to OSU’s sister/rival school the University of Oregon today to talk with my committee member there who is helping with [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Technology Quick Hits

Just a few short updates: We now have a full 25 cameras in the front half of the Visitor’s Center, which gives us pretty great coverage of these areas. Both wide establishment shots and close-up interaction angles cover the touch tanks, wave tanks (still not quite fully open to the public) and a few freshwater [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Wanted: Results

Katie Stofer

The pace of research often strikes me as wonky. This, I suppose, is true of a lot of fields: some days, you make a lot of progress, and some days very little. A series of very small steps eventually (you hope) lead to a conclusion worthy of sharing with your peers and advancing the field. [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Slightly once more

Mark located an ultra-cheap compact USB video camera and microphone online. By ultra-cheap, I mean $10. Laura clipped it to her shirt and gave it a quick trial run in the Visitor Center. It had remarkably good resolution, but muffled audio quality beyond about two feet. Also, we found that a lapel-mounted camera moves a [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

The eyetracker is here! … well, sort of.

Our actual eyetracker is a bit backordered, so we’ve got a rental for the moment. It’s astoundingly unassuming looking, just (as they picture on their web site) basically a small black bar at the bottom of a 22” monitor, plus the laptop to run the programs. When I took it out of the box, it [...]

Read the rest of this entry »