Current status

On November 29 and 30, I received the following two emails from our lab-wide MS thesis committee:

Paulina ~ MASCOM has reviewed the comments by your readers as well as the comments provided as a result of your presentation on Crit day -- you have identified a good idea but it is vague and needs more thought. Your proposal should be rewritten once you have honed in on the premise; it would be good for you to consolidate your knowledge from child psychologists into conrete rational and design principles.

------------------

Hi Paulina...

The key worry by your reviewers is that while your idea is interesting, you do not provide an empirically-derived rationale suggesting that it will actually work. You give two examples, in the written version, of the movie Amelie and the Flat Stanley project, and the interview method you propose may provide some anecdotal evidence, but there is a vast literature out there on child psychology and child-parent relationships that was not yet considered in the design. As it stands, the written proposal cites only one reference -- Piaget -- to provide any rationale.

Your reviewers are hoping for either a justification that your idea is a good one, based on psychological studies, or a refocusing of your work on discovering those principles....

Accordingly, it seems that what is needed is either good rationale from the literature to justify the design choices you are making, or a re-focusing of your work on the empirical exploration of which factors are of importance. One possibility is that if you focus on the latter, you will discover the principles of designing such a system.

Drastic focus on a concrete, take-to-the-bank subpart of the project would make it a major success.

After a rather long discussion via email, in which I tried to explain to my committee members that I was already in the process of collecting the required rationale by conducting interview-based user studies, the committee partly changed their minds and told me that writing an addendum including conclusions from the interviews and a more accurate literature study would be enough. I did just that, and a little bit more.

The new proposal has now been accepted by two of my three readers. I am currently waiting to hear back from the third reader.