Class Project

This is an hands-on class where at the end you will have actually "discovered", "built", and "validated" some bits of knowledge on happiness or some technique to promote happiness.

Final presentation

On Friday each group will have 10-15 minutes to present the results of the project. Below we explain what we expect from each type of project.

Concept prototype

Groups who are working on prototyping solutions should include:

  • description of the problem

  • show some understanding of the problem and users (literature review, results of a survey, personas)

  • conceptual model / description of the solution

  • video that showcases your idea and application / mockups

  • some validation / feedback (qualitative / questionaries)

Meta-analysis

Groups who are working on Gallup data or who are reviewing papers should include in the presentation:

    • Research question

    • Motivation (why is this question important/relevant?)

    • Hypothesis

    • Scatterplots & Analyses

    • Interpretation & conclusion

Don't forget to help each other in evaluating your solutions. Be kind, it'll make you happier :))

Kinds of projects

There are several different kinds of projects you can do:

  • Research a specific topic, find and read a set of papers about it, analyze related Gallup data, and draw your conclusions

    • Ideate and prototype a tool that aims at, for example, alleviating stress, providing joy, measuring happiness.

    • Design and validate a study

General topic: happiness and older adults

The specific topic you want to work on is up to you. As a suggestion, here we list some possible overall topics:

  • give opportunity to people to be kind, compassionate, grateful,

  • give opportunity to have experiences

  • give opportunity to interact

  • dig deeper on why old adults in certain regions seem to have worse sleep quality or find hard to find interesting things

  • dig deeper on money, spending and happiness in later life

Groups

Groups should follow these guidelines:

  • 6-10 people per group

  • maximum 8 groups

  • each group should have at least one russian-speaking person

  • members of at least 2 different nations in each group

  • we will try to have a spread of disciplines in each group

Groups formation proceeds as follows:

Write on a piece of paper a general topic and a kind of project, or add your name to one that exists already.

Or enter it here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pk5Ez8lCUSiTLLnfIBFeRTEHIEQSlKIc_bCQN3DMcZg/viewform

We will then form groups and publish them on this web site.

Deliverables

Project results are delivered and presented on Friday morning. You deliverables and presentation can be in various forms:

    • a "traditional" document

    • a set of slides

    • a video

    • a design prototype with applications such as invisionapp

    • a small tool

    • survey questions and results

You can be arbitrarily creative about it.....

Results from the group projects