The Computational Literacies Lab held our first official lab meeting on February 22nd, 2023. We had an astonishing three attendees! While attendance may have been rather lackluster, it gave those of us there an opportunity to share more deeply what we had been working on and start a larger conversation about things which have historically been reserved for one on one advisor advisee meetings. As one might imagine, both Dave and myself were interested in each other's work and I can honestly say that our mutual engagement with each others’ work was not forced, but natural and authentic. I’m calling it a successful dry run in a low pressure environment.
As far as announcements go, Finn set up an HTC Vive in the Learning Sciences Lab which is open to use by anyone. Right now it is installed on one specific PC in the lab under his account, so if you have any use for VR, contact Finn (or if you just want to play some flashy videogames, BeatSaber party anyone?). Finn is also going to be using the Lab from 4:00-8:30 on Friday afternoons this semester to host his competitive math clubs for students grades 7-12 and also the his new project, the Gifted Math Program Open Lab Time. The next lab meeting will contain a brainstorming and feedback session to help Finn flesh out what exactly it will look like. Meanwhile,
Chris is planning on finishing a review paper of languages and interfaces for learning programming and is largely focussed on launching the Computer Science course in Lockport, starting on February 8th. Finn is preoccupied with the success of his Open Lab Time project and spring also marks the main season for competitive math and he will be traveling around the state on various weekends for the next few months for various contests his students are competing in. Dave is engaged in collaborative study involves P5js and is in a data collection stage.
We also decided not to share our meeting notes publicly, nor our whitepapers, as they are by definition not in publishable form, but instead opted to publish these summaries as blog posts. Chris needs to work on getting the website ported to zola and will be hopefully demoing it for us this coming lab meeting. Remember that if you would like feedback, whitepapers should be between one and two pages long and be sent out to the lab members at least 24 hours in advance so we all have ample chance to read them.
Hope to see more faces next week!
