This week was all about working with participants through the experiments at Robot House. By the end of the week, we had 11 participants visit the house and run the experiment and a total of 30 participants overall! Having originally planned to have 30 participants as a minimum, and still having a week plus for more participants, I feel pretty good about how well this research trip has gone. And I hope that I can get a few extra people to show up before I leave.

Overall, the experiment has gone well, but I did find an issue with my counterbalancing. It seems that, even though I was using random numbers and that they were random in general, the randomness was less pronounced locally. Luckily, I found this early enough that it was possible to guide the randomness such that it lead to better counterbalancing. I guess having reached the minimum number of people, I need to start analyzing the results and writing things up. I’ll need to do a bit of a refresh on my empirical methods and hope I planned things correctly.

Aside from this, I also got to explore the Horse and the Groom in Old Hatfield as it was another colleague’s birthday this week, but he had planned well as his birthday was on the day the pub offered free Bangers and Mash with a drink. It was a nice pub that really matched one idea of a pub that you would see from the old days. It was a good time, and I can certainly recommend the place. In fact, after reading about how enjoyable reading is in the pub, I managed to spend a couple of hours doing some reading and writing in pubs this week.