budgeting - 3/30/2007

The site is coming along. I had a great idea today for the budget page. I decided I would give the students choices as to their stage in life (or imaginary stage in life) and make there budget and expense options based on their stage in life.
So, I have single, single with child, couple, and couple with child. The student picks one of these areas and is given a living situation and expenses, They have to decide how much they will spend in each area: savings, housing, food, transportation, entertainment, personal care, and miscellaneous.

I designed the budget page so the student wouldn’t have enough money to get the high end options on all of categories. The students have to choose two areas that are important to them and kind of skimp on everything else. I like this because budgeting is all about making decisions on what is most important to the individual.

crossword puzzle - 3/23/2007

I am very pleased with my most recent addition to the site. In my design I implemented some games for the students to play that would reinforce some of the things they were learning on the site. I thought I might be able to use JavaScript to make some game for this electronic based medium. I did not, however, know how to do this.

I have been searching for a few days to find a script and hopefully learn how to edit it to make my own crossword puzzle. Well, I am please to say that I was able to do just that. It took a great deal of effort; I have never had JavaScript training of any kind. It was very much a “let’s see what this does” type method. But I feel a great deal of accomplishment having created it—even though it only accounts for one small page on my site.

ready, aim, fire - 3/16/2007

I feel that I have designed well and conducted sufficient user analysis to tweak my design as needed and I am ready to fire away, i.e. code it all and get it on the site. I realized this week that we have 35 more days until the project is due. SO, it’s time to implement all my theories and test them again.

user analysis - 3/10/2007

I have been conducting user analysis on my design, trying to find the most effective and interesting way to present this information. I thought it would be easy for my students to get excited about money, but managing money is something that is a little far removed for them to grasp fully. I have designed games and word searches to practice the content. The students have been more receptive to the games but still aren’t ecstatic about learning to budget there money.

While trying to make the instruction more teen-friendly I found some really great resources for educators from University of California Cooperative Extensions (UCCE).

back - 3/1/2007

So I am back… my hard drive died. I spent a week getting it fixed and then another week getting everything back where it was to begin with. It’s been an ugly process. But while I was waiting for the HD to get fixed I spent a lot of time at school figuring out my portfolio. http://stu-inst.usu.edu/~cfelt/portfolio/portfolio.html

I also spent a good amount of time designing the three other money lessons and implementing the usability study done last semester to improve the original site. In addition to the usability study, I received feedback from my peers that has helped me identify areas of improvement.