August 27th - 31st

Week's Plan:
Write a lot of my dissertation proposal. Focusing on combining like sections and filling out the proposed contributions section. Also add some more specific examples of the tables, diagrams, etc. so that it is more clear.

Week's Accomplishments:
I wrote a lot. I combined necessary sections and was able to make a concrete direction in the text. The proposed contributions chapter is more directed and concrete. The related work has the appropriate sections and direction, though lacks the text needed.

I submitted the work to Tiffany on Thursday night, for the Friday train ride. Also fixed our issues with dropbox.

Problems:
I was not able to address Entropy example. I worked on this but ran into two issues. For entropy  to work, we want to separate based on students that make it to a goal state and students that do not. If we use a simple data-set with less than 10 students, overlap is pretty rare, meaning most states have a frequency of 1. By default all frequency 1 states have an entropy of zero, meaning they are uninteresting. After you remove those states, the overall contribution of entropy is pretty low. However with a much larger graph, like 100 or 200 students, the number of states with a non-zero entropy should be significantly higher. 

I should graph the percent of non frequency one states, to case count (ie. sample size of students) to show the relationship of growth between these two variables. For large samples it seems roughly 50% of the states are frequency one. For smaller samples as much as 80 or 90 percent of states can be frequency one.

Next Week's Plan:
Read the feedback on my draft, make changes as necessary. Continue writing.
1) Add motivation to the introduction chapter.
2) Add content to related work.


Other Pieces of Work: (I just don't want to forget these ideas, not sure how necessary / important they are)

We should export the frequency data for the stoichiometry data and load that into yEd and see what see.

We should write some type of data loader that lets load in "hint-actions" so we can see where students request hints.

I should develop a Data-Properties class to more appropriately manage the different functions we have available depending on what type of data is read in. Basically the object just stores a dozen or so flags that are set based on what columns are read in, in the data-import stage of the program.