May Tran - Weeks 2-3

In the past two weeks, I have begun testing on children at the Bing nursery school. The nursery is a part of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and was a gift from Dr. Peter S. Bing and his mother, Mrs. Anna Bing Arnold. The children enrolled at the nursery are mostly available as research subjects for the Stanford Psychology Department since their parents have given consent to their participation in research. Despite this, the nursery is extremely nice and has all sorts of activities for the children to partake.

Within the nursery, there are three main classrooms for the children and experimental rooms for the researchers. These experimental rooms are called 'game rooms' because in order to get a child to participate in their research, an experimenter would have to ask them to come to the game room to play with the experimenter's game. Within these game rooms are cameras, microphones, and a one-way mirror, where the children can be observed from an observatory room nearby. The picture below shows my view from the observatory room.

Prior to experimentation, Isabel, another research assistant who is also helping my graduate student, and I were given a script to memorize. Isabel plays the role of the main experimenter, who recruits the children for research and introduces them to toys. I play Kristen, the confederate that will be observing the children fail or succeed. 

For our experiment, we are specifically testing two conditions: the Inaccurate-Fail and Accurate conditions. The procedures are identifical for these conditions and the only difference being whether the confederate will watch the child fail entirely (Inaccurate-Fail) or fail and then succeed (Accurate). We have not tested with the Inaccurate-Success condition, where the confederate watches the child succeed for all of their attempts at the toy.

Toy 1 is a ladybug toy that was made by the lab that would play music when the the child pushes a certain combination of buttons. The music is controlled by the experimenter via a seperate remote during the experiment, making it a fake toy. Toy 2 is the balancing toy that I made (image below).

Our pilot on Tuesday actually didn't go quite according to plan because my balancing toy, which is supposedly unbalanceable without a magnet underneath, stood on its own when the child pushed on it very hard. This was a problem because we only brought one block to the nursery that morning, therefore we could only test with three children - two of which were null because the children succeeded in making the block stand. In the afternoon, we returned and brought another block. This block, on the other hand, was impossible to be balanced on the box. Even with the magnet, I had to place it at a particular spot on the box for it to be successfully balanced. Unfortunately, after a child attempted to make this block stand thirty times, the block broke and wouldn't stand even with the magnet.

We couldn't run back to the lab to get another block because all of the other blocks were also unbalanceable with the magnet, so I had to improvise. What I did was that I would demonstrate to the children that the block was able to stand with the block that stood on its own. Then, I would 'accidentally' drop that block under the table, pick up the block that couldn't stand even with the magnet, and have the child attempt the toy with that block instead, ensuring that they would definitely fail. It was elaborate, but it worked and we were able to experiment with five children, which is a lot more than the three children quota we were given.

On Thursday, unfortunately, the ladybug toy's remote broke and we couldn't get the music to play. Thus, we missed an entire testing day recreating that toy. My job was to spray paint the head of the lady bug, and it was very nice because all I had to do was spray paint this yellow foam ball black and wait for it to dry. So essentially all I did was sit outside and enjoy the weather.

I haven't gotten to coding the videos, yet, because Mika hasn't decided on what to code for. We will definitely do more testings next week, and hopefully nothing malfunctions again.