For Creative Tech Task 2, I decided to work with a sound sensor. For my product, I want to create a device that measures a person’s speaking volume, designed as a tool to help people ensure they are speaking loudly enough, e.g. when practising for presentations. I thought of this idea because it’s a device I could personally use, as I’ve always found it hard to project my voice and often speak too quietly in general. Ironically, this made testing my device quite challenging, since speaking loudly enough for the sensor to pick up was difficult to do myself. I’m hoping to go into the tech lab again outside of class, when it’s quiet, to hopefully feel less embarrassed and try testing it again.

Continuing my research essay, after my first session with Jamie, I was introduced to using the university’s library website to find academic papers for my essay. I’ve definitely found it to be a good resource, but it can also be a bit overwhelming. It’s also easy to get sidetracked by interesting but slightly off-topic papers. To stay on top of this, I’m trying to be strict about linking everything I read and reference back to my essay title.

At the moment, I’m starting with looking through the library resources, and then if I need more context or can’t quite find what I’m looking for, I move on to searching the web and looking at articles rather than research papers. I’ve also found it helpful to write my thoughts in messy notes and loose sentence structures directly after reading each source, which looks like nonsense right now, but I plan to neatly go back through everything next week and rewrite it into something a bit more coherent.