Does your work require IRB approvals?
If Yes, articulate your detailed IRB strategy.
If No, explain why you don’t need IRB approval and
identify situations when you might need IRB approval.

Yes, our work does require IRB approval because we are conducting research with human subjects; our research pertains to a technology that may change traditional methods of education and become part of general knowledge. Also, it involves vulnerable and protected populations such as children since we are collecting data from youths 13 and up. We will probably qualify for IRB exempt status because we are a minimal risk project for the participants. Thus, our strategy should involve filling out an application for the IRB thoroughly but we can rest with less expectations that it will need more than one month as long as it is submitted before the the second Tuesday of every month, since that is when the IRB convenes. We should include information about the procedure of our research and how it will involve kids 13 to adults since the people who use the technology will vary depending on the demographics of the visitors of the nature centers and public libraries. It is important to note that our practices will be simple surveys of their experience using the technology and their thoughts on how interactive and educational they felt the content was. We may need to create waivers of consent for children under 18 because they are minors and are protected under federal laws. These will have to be filled out by the guardian(s) that accompany them to the venues where our technology will be distributed. The surveys will be anonymous with relatively few personal identifiers that will place people at risk so it is unlikely to cause a breach of confidentiality. The fact that it is a minimal risk project unlike for example, a biomedical research project greatly eases the process of submitting an application for IRB review. Also, every member of the project has already done the IRB training and received a certificate of completion indicating that they are aware of research ethics.

Develop an outline for your mid-semester presentations.
What supporting evidence will you provide for each point?
How will you boost your credibility every step of the way?

Professor Khanjan and Bill have discussed and decided that the LVSIF groups will not be doing the mid-semester presentations. However, were we to present, we would focus our presentation around the concept of our project. Since it is important to be informative of our purpose and inspiring, we should focus heavily on how our outcome ( or dream as Khanjan would say), is to eventually have our software utilized by many people to learn about environmental issues and be scaled to the extent where it is also present in formal education settings. Then we can explain how our approach is unique from competitors such as companies developing virtual reality for commercial activities- one furniture company has a software that allows users to decorate a room in iVR so they can see how the couch they are planning to buy will look in their home before they purchase it. Our approach is unique because we are focusing on alternative education through immersive and interactive game interfaces. We want people to have ease of absorption of information through high levels of engagement since people tend to learn and retain information better if they are actively involved & invested in what is happening around them/ the subject matter. We can provide evidence through some data we collected with students from a local middle school last spring and continue with talking on future development based on feedback from the prototype users. It is important to keep in mind that the presentation should have a logical flow and be simple for people who are not in the know to understand; this means using as few technical terms as we can, only what we need, and connecting all of our ideas with transitions to avoid jumps in logic and disrupting the flow of thought of the audience. It might be a challenge to flow from the idea of our project to the financials and business model because we are currently only working in terms of non-formal education. This provides a challenge in talking about a timeline for return of investment since it is difficult to predict the market. However, we can boost credibility by providing the names of organizations and people we will be working with, grants we have received for the project, and who our other funders are.