Class was very similar for each week. They were pretty much straight lectures. Dr. Winograd would explain a concept and then painstakingly show examples that would be easy to follow and understand. I am sure that there were many student who found the pace too slow, but I appreciated the variety of explanations and thorough understanding I received. There have been three assignments that have been given, each worth 100 points. The first assignment took me about an hour and I felt pretty good about the grade I would receive and my understanding of the homework. The second assignment went pretty well until I tried to correlate one answer to another in which the only difference was the way the data was displayed. It had to do with outliers and I was getting three in one answer and two in the other which didn't make sense.
Grading takes about a week, and when I checked, I was given a grade of 70/100. I was surprised and made an appointment to discuss, as well as determine what I was doing wrong in assignment number two. Dr. Winograd has office hours on Thursdays so I arrived about an hour before class and was able to see him right away. The office space he was using was pretty small (maybe 12' x 12'). We discussed the first assignment and I found out that I used the wrong graph (bar chart) versus the histogram that was called for. I thought that either Excel or SPSS would create the correct graph, but I was mistaken.
Knowing that this class was my only prerequisite and didn't count towards my final GPA, I still wanted to understand the concepts for my career. I asked him to help me understand assignment two and why my results weren't the same in both answers. The reason was that these outliers were suspected and the formulas that Excel used for Q1, Q3 were different that the formulas we used in class. However, SPSS results did match the formulas we used in class. Odd but true. I spent about an hour on my own checking my calculations over and over which was very frustrating. He spent time actually walking me through the assignment, showing me the areas that I miscalculated and explained why as well.
Our meeting lasted about 20 minutes, which gave me enough time to use a campus computer, update my homework and submit. I finished in 15 minutes and submitted. I will be surprised if I have less than 90 points.
Next: HCI 440: Our First Team Project Results and the Midterm
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