Leaving Cert '24 CompSci Project

    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~

1 - Meeting the Brief

[video goes right here]

2 - Investigation

To begin my investigation, I considered many aspects of well-being. I thought about the likes of meditation, study, and exercise tools, but these areas seemed too vague and oversaturated. Instead, I settled on creating an embedded system specifically for creative work, as I know many creatives - including myself - struggle with making progress on creative projects of all kinds. The creative process can be very difficult at times, but when it goes well it can have incredible effects on the individual's well-being _[1] , and can serve as a very uplifting activity for people of all ages. I surveyed some students in my year, and came to the conclusion that most people face three primary roadblocks when it comes to creative work: staying focused, staying calm, and finding inspiration. I decided that my system will aim to assist the user in reaching a balance of these three aspects of creativity, through giving positive reinforcement and encouraging regular breaks

I conducted some basic research and found some different methods to promote focus and calmness, as used by tools such as Forest _[2]. This app encourages users to put down their phone for extended periods of time, and if the user does use their phone, it encourages them to get back to work. In my research I also came across a process used by David Bowie, Brian Eno, and many other prominent musicians and artists called 'Oblique Strategies' _[3]. Originally packaged as a deck of cards, Oblique Strategies is composed of over a hundred cards with simple phrases such as "(Organic) Machinery" and "Honour thy error as a hidden intention". These cards, intended to inspire the end user to get out of a creative rut, have been heralded by many musicians and artists as being a saving grace in their creative processes (see Bowie) and as such I thought they could serve as a very useful basis for the 'inspiration' section of my system. I adapted some of the phrases on these cards into the context of my system.

[~60 words short]

3 - Plan and Design

The primary function of my project will be to track the user's calmness, focus, and inspiration, and give them suggestions to improve on these three pillars of creativity.

The basic process of the embedded system will be as follows: the user will be asked if they are feeling calm. If they are not, the system will give them a random suggestion from a prewritten list ('go for a walk', 'chat to a friend', etc.) to help improve calmness. The system will then ask again if they are calm. If not, it will repeat the above. If yes, it will repeat the same process for both focus and inspiration (though the inspiration prompts are less like suggestions, and more similar to the phrases used in Eno's 'Oblique Strategies', aiming to promote new ways of thinking about the project). After the user has reported feeling calm, focussed and inspired, the system will show their 'mScore', a number used to indicate their headspace before using the system (more detail in the flowchart below). When the user is finished working, they will be asked whether they are happy with their work, and prompted to view the data collected by the system over time, allowing them to analyse and understand the trends in their creative productivity for themself.

I have laid out the functionality of the embedded system with the following flowchart [CITATION].

For the embedded system I plan to use a micro:bit to intuatively take analog button presses from the user, and communicate this data to the user's computer via serial input. I will use python code to decode the inputs from the micro:bit, and serve as a more straightforward user interface than the micro:bit's built in LED display, giving the user text prompts through their terminal of choice. The use of python will also allow the system to display graphs and charts with pandas and matplotlib. I also used pandas to power the analysis of the data, as shown at the end of the video in section one.

[~60 words short]

4 - Create

Testing

To test my system, I generated pseudo random numbers using random.org and used these to determine the answers I would give to the system. I did this to stop myself from subconsiously repeating patterns (as humans tend to do) that could mess up the aggregated data.

5 - Evaluation

The initial design for my project had to be shifted around and played with quite a lot to meet all the requirements laid out. It was quite difficult to parse what the "'what if' questions" parts was asking for, and not fully understanding this at the outset definitely made it harder for me to adapt the system to fit this requirement. As I understand them now, the only part of this requirement I haven't fully fulfilled is that the connection of these questions to the database generated by the system, which seems to be a fundemental flaw in my system's (mis)alignment with these requirements.

I feel I have fulfilled all the basic requrements

6 - References