Week #817
We organized three surveys this month. We continue with our monthly student survey. October is usually one of our largest months. We also started a survey for younger students and high school students. For the 1st-5th graders, it is all anonymous, no names, just sex and grade. We send the info to the school contact who keeps track of who’s taken it and hasn’t and hands out the unique codes accordingly. The survey is all text to speech and images. At the other end of the spectrum, we have high schoolers who seem to ignore emails, but respond “better” to SMSes. Next week we’ll send an email about our upcoming robo-calls and the actual robo-calls next week.
On Tuesday we sent our ◍ Quarternotes Q4. We introduce our custom subscriber badges, so if you’re not subscribed you should!
We published more about our experimental camera apps and along with that updated the dedicated camera page with our App Bundle and these two new experiments.
On Wednesday we went to an afternoon meet-up about some Nordic Game Designers. We couldn’t stick around long, but it was interesting to see and meet some folks from the academic side of things.
We also continued to work a bit more on an VR/AR prototype based on a Unity app. This is a super cool project, but they don’t have a clear direction and our time on the project is coming to an end.
We’ve also been deep in another internal game project that has been picking-up some speed while we wait for other game projects to get green-lit meetings.
We did our second-to-last pass on some of the LED lighting, code and assignments into the database. There is atleast one more review in the workshop and then again in situ for the client. And probably a few more in between as we continue to iron out small details.
Week #818
Monday was a federal holiday in the US, so things were a bit slow.
On the survey side, we ran a small A/B/C test. On Monday, we conducted our robocalls to high school students. They respond much better to SMSes than to emails. The previous Friday, we sent an email letting them know about the upcoming Monday robocall and the ability to opt-out. As a test, we wanted to send an email to a sub-set of schools and see if their response rates increased or not. SMSes cost much more than emails to send, but not so much if we can drastically increase the participation. On Sunday, we first recorded all the school response rates. Then we chose two schools: the highest and lowest response rates and sent their students SMS reminders about the Monday robocall. We sent a similar SMS to two different schools on Monday morning. With this information we wanted to measure 2 variables with our test and control groups. Did sending an SMS reminder about a robocall spur more participants to answer? We could measure the difference between the response rates on Sunday morning compared to the change on Tuesday after the robocall. We also could measure if a reminder on a Sunday pushed more participants to immediately answer worked better or worse than on a Monday. We strive for an 80% response rate for reliable data, so anything that can increase by just 1% helps.
We continue to tweak some web calendar tool for the concreters in Australia. They put in all their job info and construction steps. Originally this was on a gantt chart style view, then we moved it to a weekly calendar. Now the events for sequential days don’t line-up. So we’re trying to find some middle ground.
Another project we’ve been trying to get out continues to drag on. We built a health related survey probably 10 years ago and no longer can support it. We’ve been working on handing it off for months, but we’re told it is currently stuck in legal. The lawyers re drafting updated contracts for the new suppliers and we can’t move it until they agree… so we continue to support it until that happens.
On Thursday, we had a long morning chat with an old friend and played catch-up on their projects and ours. We brainstormed a bit about some stereoscopic camera apps and how a dedicated app has its advantages over the native ones for syncing and re-combining images into a 3D image from two different devices.
Another project we’ve been working on is basically a CMS (Content Management System) with some pretty specific features. As part of that, we built an iOS app for the iPad and a Desktop app for viewing. After a quick meeting with the client and some of their sales folks, we are re-using the web-based CMS tool to also act as a presentation tool. It won’t be as full-featured as the app, but it is cross-platform and the end-customer can also load the content locally for remote presentations.
Bric-à-brac
As part of another projects, we were shown this: Onelinefonts.com It is the source for single line fonts for use with CNC machining, engraving, scrapbooking, and many other creative endeavors.
That’s a pretty specific use-case, but an important one!