September Updates

 

10 September 2008

During this meeting we set up a timeline for the entirety of the project and then further discussed our goals/timeline for the month of September. A majority of our September work will be in research and focus group preparations. We also discussed how we would like to share our research logs in a collaboriative, digitial fashion.

Each group member laid out a set of goals for our next meeting which included further research into development for the Wii, meeting the researches at Indiana University who have worked with our cohort in regards to the Wii, and continuing to review published literature.

17 September 2008

Between meetings, Dan and Katie met with Lesa Lorenzen-Huber, a professor who, aided by several students, worked at local nursing home residence with the elderly and the Wii. The meeting was very informative and enabled us as a group to narrow our age group down to those between the ages of 55 and 65 years old. We also gained invaluable knowledge and insight into the issues, both technically and ethically, about the types of games and feedback that games provide. Our inital idea to create games that were very obviously “brain games” evolved into the need to create games that benefited the brain while being more entertaining. Our meeting, although successful left many open ended questions, which we plan to address in our research and by meeting again with Professor Huber at the nursing home with the elderly who used the Wii.

Claire researched development tools for the Wii and came up with three methods of how to hack the system. She plans to futher look into and try each of these methods which includeslooking at three forms of hacks, the internet channel with flash, a lowlevel system development, and just hacking the controller to control a PC

Further discussion was done on our collaborate workspace. We are going to use a wiki to share our group data between ourselves. Dan is looking into this for our next meeting.


24 September 2008

Claire continuide to look into the Wii hacks. Although she is going to still try to experiment with all of the options, it appears as though the flash based option may work best.

Social network sites target at the Baby Boomer generation were researched for features, important topics, and general setup. Several stuck out as valuable resources and had even conducted research of their own in terms of “brain games”, social issues, technology, and physical fitness. One site in particular was contacted to see if we could obtain further data from their research. Based on our meeting with Dr. Huber and our outside research, focus group questions and topics to be covered have been outlined.

Our collaborative workspace has been set up as a project on Indiana University’s classroom management website, OnCourse. Resources will be uploaded and information posted on our private wiki.