Week 2 Workshop: Measure a feeling

A working session on precision and repeatability — turning "floaty" into a table two different people would fill in the same way.

1 March 2027

Preparation#

Read the week 2 lecture and bring your five-jump table from its task. If you didn’t finish it, bring what you have — the session starts from wherever your table actually is, not from a finished one.

Activity#

1. In pairs, both run the same immediate-mode preset for five jumps each, and compare tables side by side. They will not match exactly — human hold times vary — but the trend (longer hold, taller jump, longer airtime) should be visible in both.
2. Add the predicted-airtime column from the lecture task if you haven’t already, and check it against the measured column together. Where a pair disagrees on the prediction method, work out why before moving on.
3. As a group: name one source of imprecision in the measurement itself (reaction time before a press registers, frame timing, rounding in the displayed number) versus one source of imprecision in the jump (the hold itself varying between attempts). These are different problems, and the Jump Autopsy assessment in week 3 asks you to acknowledge both kinds.

Output#

The completed six-column table and the two sentences from the spec above, handed to your tutor at the end of the session.

Criteria#

Not marked, but treated as the direct rehearsal for Jump Autopsy’s method section: if you can’t yet state how many trials you ran and under what preset clearly enough for a partner to reproduce your table, that’s the gap to close before week 3.