Lance Cheng (he/him), University of Massachusetts Amherst

Week 1: Mon 06/03 – Sun 06/09

Hi! A little bit about myself: I’m Lance, I use he/him pronouns, and I’m a native New Yorker. I just finished my first year at UMass, where I study data science, CS, public interest technology, and comparative literature. Besides academics, I also love volunteering as a notetaker, working as a TA and at UMass’s queer resource center, learning languages, and playing guitar.

This summer, I’ll be working on the Community Game Development Toolkit with Professor Daniel Lichtman. The Toolkit is a set of tools for the Unity game engine that allows you to make collage scenes, and it was particularly developed so people without technical game development skills could still create games – otherwise, we’d miss out on so many of their unique perspectives! I hope this blog can be useful to future applicants to the REU who want to see what the experience is like or future students who work with Dan and want something to reference.

I spent most of the latter half of the week doing some literature review and coming up with different experimental designs, with the goal of the experiments being to determine if the Toolkit’s features help people feel more creative and in touch with themselves. It was great meeting Dr. Wole (who organizes this REU), the mentors, and the other interns so far, and I’m excited to work more with all of them in the coming weeks! I’m also excited to bring together the artistic and quantitative aspects of computation and figure out how to design something that maximizes creative possibilities.

Week 2: Mon 06/10 – Sun 06/16

Second week completed! The biggest event of this week was finalizing the basis of the experiment I’ll be running. Dan wanted to see how the Toolkit could help diverse communities tell stories about themselves, and to make that benchmark a little more measurable, I’ve decided to investigate if the Toolkit’s collage-style approach makes people more confident in their creativity compared to other tools. Most of my time was spent brainstorming experiment structures, doing even more literature review, and drafting the introduction and related works sections of my paper. This was also my first time using LaTeX, which was much easier than I thought it would be, thankfully.

Something else that’s been really helpful: reaching out to Dan’s former interns! Two people have worked with Dan before me (Amelia Roth and Habin Park, both of whose publications are linked on this REU home page), and both of them are lovely people who gave thoughtful advice when I discussed some of the problems I was running into. It sounds obvious, but to anyone in the future, please do reach out to past REU cohorts; it made me feel much less isolated to know they encountered the same issues and published successfully despite that.

Week 3: Mon 06/17 – Sun 06/23

Come on and slam and welcome to the (game) jam. I’ve been reflecting on itch.io’s visual novel and narrative game community, which is largely made up of amateurs who want to tell stories about themselves – exactly what the goal of the Toolkit is. Some of my favorite itch creators include graeme borland, Angela He, and Nicky Case!. I’m also happy to announce that the first few trials (ie, people I will be making into my Unity guinea pigs) will be run next Tuesday! They’ll be asked to take a “before” survey, perform a creative task using Unity and the Toolkit, and then take an “after” survey.

Week 4: Mon 06/24 – Sun 06/30

I’ve finished drafting the first few sections of the paper (Abstract, Introduction, Related Works, and Methods). For the next couple weeks before I have enough data to analyze, most of my work will consist of brute-forcing my way into finding experiment subjects.

Week 5: Mon 06/31 – Sun 07/07

This week, I performed my first trial! The one subject I’ve worked with picked up Unity and the Toolkit a lot faster than I thought people would, and this person was on the less technically inclined side, so it can only be up from here. Plus, now I have at least a couple images of that subject’s creation for the paper. I have thirteen (!!!!) more subjects lined up, as well as some candidates I need to get in touch with, so I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about my sample size and confidence levels! In a perfect world, I’d like to have somewhere in the ballpark of 25 subjects, but honestly, fourteen isn’t too bad.

Week 6: Mon 07/08 – Sun 07/14

Thirteen subjects turned out not to be quite the correct number; because of lack of access to a computer that can run Unity (ie, without exploding…), some participants have had to drop out. However, I’m working with my advisor to source more from his past students and other communities he’s worked with, so hopefully there’ll be an uptick soon. Regardless of whether or not I can source more participants, I held five more trials this week. It doesn’t sound like a ton, but all of them are one-on-one and they’ve run about forty minutes each so far, so they take a lot of energy. At least a few more trials in the following week will bring me up to ten participants total.

While the 25-subject ballpark was not reached by any means, I feel decently satisfied knowing that it is at least an improvement on sample sizes in past Toolkit studies. And isn’t that what research is all about?

Week 7: Mon 07/15 – Sun 07/21

I managed to get one last participant in the ring, so the total sample size is eleven participants. I also have 22 total respondents (11 who did not complete the experimental task) to the “before” survey after asking people to complete it just so I could have a broader range of data. I’ve also begun looking at the data. It doesn’t seem like there’s too much statistical significance to the quantitative data, but looking at the qualitative data in participants’ written responses is super interesting and provides more specific insight into what features would be helpful. In particular, something like Scratch’s sprite creation canvas might see a lot of use.

Week 8: Mon 07/22 – Fri 07/26

The final week! I was happy to have spent more time with my fellow interns this week, and my final presentation to the Iowa State SPIRE REU students went pretty well too. Some closing thoughts:

• As implied above, I wish I’d made more time to bond with the other interns.
• On a similar note, it would have been nice to connect more with the graduate research assistants and previous REU participants as well.
• I underestimated just how confusing LaTeX can be… “Why is my table there?” has become my mantra.
• People find Unity a lot more intuitive once you make them realize it’s not really that scary, its interface just isn’t the most approachable. And even less creatively inclined individuals can find fun in it!

While the REU is wrapping up, the paper itself hasn’t quite yet. I’ll be continuing to work on it in the coming week for submission to ISS on August 15th, so communication is still ongoing with Dr. Wole and my mentor on technicalities (not to mention LaTeX confusion, because why actually is my table there?).

All in all, it’s been a pretty excellent summer. I really appreciated the opportunity to perform meaningful research into creativity and digital media, to connect with a wide range of students in computer science and other STEM fields, and to grow my appreciation for interdisciplinary study! You can find below some of the scenes created by participants in Unity – they really are something.

In order: “First(ish) Steps,” Arthur Murray; “Mommy’s Little Helper,” John Cheng; “Summertime Backyard Memories,” Mia Ikeda.