Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: human-computer interaction
- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
For my creative project thesis, I have designed and developed a video game called Amity Academy. Amity Academy is a strategic resource management simulator that aims to subvert genre expectations and challenge generally accepted definitions of success and leadership both in-game and in the real world. It does so by moving the focus away from amassing large amounts of in-game currencies and becoming politically or militarily dominant towards caring for the denizens of the social unit the player controls. The player acts as an administrator at a school where they must make decisions on how to best run the institution. Although they are allowed to lead the school however they see fit, the emphasis is on prioritizing strong interpersonal and intracommunity relationships and connections and the wellbeing and happiness of those under their ward. Amity Academy is also part of the newly-emerging “wholesome” or “comfy” game genre. Unlike serious strategy games that can be stressful, Amity Academy presents a self-paced, low-stakes situation. This mood is further encouraged by calming environmental noises and music, a gentle color palette, and a charming art style. The game feels domestic and quaint, almost reminiscent of a Jane Wooster Scott or Mary Singleton painting. You can download and play Amity Academy here: https://mvaughn8.itch.io/amity-academy
is challenging due to cognitive biases, varying
worker expertise, and varying subjective scales. This
work investigates new ways to determine collective decisions
by prompting users to provide input in multiple
formats. A crowdsourced task is created that aims
to determine ground-truth by collecting information in
two different ways: rankings and numerical estimates.
Results indicate that accurate collective decisions can
be achieved with less people when ordinal and cardinal
information is collected and aggregated together
using consensus-based, multimodal models. We also
show that presenting users with larger problems produces
more valuable ordinal information, and is a more
efficient way to collect an aggregate ranking. As a result,
we suggest input-elicitation to be more widely considered
for future work in crowdsourcing and incorporated
into future platforms to improve accuracy and efficiency.
Engaging users is essential for designers of any exhibit, such as the human-computer interface, the visual effects, or the informational content. The need to understand users’ experiences and learning gains has motivated a focus on user engagement across computer science. However, there has been limited review of how human-computer interaction research interprets and employs the concepts in museum and exhibit settings, specifically their joint effects. The purpose of this study is to assess users’ experience and learning outcome, while interacting with a web application part of an exhibit that showcases the NASA Psyche spacecraft model. This web application provides an interactive menu that allows the user to navigate on the touch panel installed within the Psyche Spacecraft Exhibit. The user can press the button on the menu which will light up the corresponding parts of the model with a detailed description displayed on the panel. For this study, participants were required to take a questionnaire, a pretest, and a posttest. They were also required to interact with the web application while wearing an Emotiv EPOC+ EEG headset that measures their emotions while they were visiting the exhibit. During the study, data such as questionnaire results, sensed emotions from the EEG headset, and pretest and posttest scores were collected. Using the information gathered, the study explores user experience and learning gains through both biometrics and traditional tools. The findings show that users felt engaged and frustrated the most and that users gained more knowledge but at varying degrees from the interaction. Future work can be done to lower the levels of frustration and keep learning gains at a more consistent rate by improving the exhibit design to better meet various learning needs and visitor profiles.