Sprint 4: Tasks

Hi, this is Vicky documenting our progress so far in this sprint.

Inspired by our pretotype from the previous sprint, we wanted to create something more concrete to help us move on to the next step. So far, we’ve learned a lot about the problem space, NASA’s current training paradigm and creative problem solving (CPS), and our growing pile of sticky notes and models signify our progress in the project.

We’re doing great!

Yes, but we also realized everything we have is still in the abstract space. While understanding the inner workings of the problem space helped us gain a solid foundation, in order to deal with the problem itself, we’ll need to start making something tangible. Fast.

From model to tasks, tasks to metrics

After synthesizing our understanding of CPS from our past readings and interviews, we finally created a model of our version of CPS in NASA…and we were left to think what to do with the rest of our lives.

Process in making the model

Tada! Our CPS Model!

Ok, not really, though it felt like it in some ways. We’ve been immersing ourselves with knowledge about the problem space to such an extent that we overlooked how the model will help us achieve our objective: helping researchers assess CPS.

Thus, another model was born to determine our next steps to eventually designing our solution. We determined that the CPS model would be used to design the tasks used for evaluating people’s performances, and the tasks will then enable us to generate metrics for researchers to assess.

Tsk, tsk, tasks!

We set out with the ambition to create a scenario that would encompass our CPS model. Drawing inspiration from escape rooms, we attempted to design a list of tasks that a team of 4 would go through.

Discussions about what tasks to include

Our imagined interface the players will look at

Nevertheless, after creating a lo-fi scenario with a task and consulting our faculty and client, we discovered we were missing some steps between the CPS model and the task design to help us build effective scenarios.

1. Understand the human qualities in the CPS process:
   To assess a team’s CPS skills, we would be analyzing the qualities that the team displays through the simulation. Sounds obvious, but it flew right past our heads.
2. Understand the qualities of anomalies:
   For our result to be effective and applicable, the tasks themselves should bear similar traits to real-world anomalies the crew encounters.
3. Limit the scope:
   To design metrics and evaluation methods, it’s more effective to limit the range of qualities we aim to assess to reduce the variables that could taint the results.

Luckily, with our prior extensive study, we were able to then come up with a list of desired human qualities, while we’ll be spending some more time looking into the details of the cause and effects of anomalies.

Next step: no game no task

While we were sharing our new findings and thoughts we’ve accumulated over the weekends, in particular regarding what certain aspects of human qualities we’d be testing for and the types of tasks that would fit, examples of games often popped up in our conversations.

Games can represent parts of the CPS model, which would encompass parts of the traits — perfect for testing on a smaller scope. Furthermore, games already exist and we don’t have to spend another week designing and refining suitable tasks. There are games that already test the traits we are interested in, but lack quantifiable output for researchers. This led us to wonder…

What if we use existing games as a medium to establish metrics?

Tune in next sprint to see how this goes!

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This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.