Nicholas Hubbert

2009 DREU

Week 1:

            I took of tour around the city on foot. This is a pretty big campus. If it didn't rain so much here, the weather would be perfect.

I met my partner Maduka who will be working with me also. Overall from the looks of it this is going to be a great experience. My mentor

introduced me to most of the staff in his department. He made my account and got my keycard so I can access the labs. I used a

day or two to look over the basic HTML tutorials to create my webpage. I am now looking over the PHP tutorials because we

will be using PHP scripting for my project.

Week 2:

            We made a lot of progress this week in deciding on the type of questions, the time limit for the user

to analyze, and extending our knowledge on PHP so we can implement this all in an application. The beginning

of the week we had our scheduled group meeting on Tuesday. We basically talked about what type of questions

we are going to ask and what is the time limit for the user to answer the question on the user group survey.

The types of questions we are going to ask are

-           Multiple Choice

            1.         Which dataset is the most diverse?

-           Short Answer

            1.         What is the most/least diverse attribute in the dataset represented in this picture?

-           Scale

            1.         How diverse is the dataset represented in this picture (1-10)?

This is just for example, this in not final. The questions may change, but the types of questions will

remain the same. Later on during the week we also talked about how was going to store the images and questions.

We decided to store the images, questions and answers in a database.

            Our mentor wanted us to get some practice in storing images and questions and outputting it thought

the web browser using PHP. We found out how to display the images side by side but we had trouble with

displaying the radio buttons for the multiple choice questions. From some research through the internet

and help from this book titled "PHP & MySQL" by Larry Ullman, we were able to implement our first problem.

We are still trying to find out ways we can display the two other types of questions, scale and short

answer......So hopefully next week we will have the answers.

Week 3:

            This was yet another wonderful week in Corvallis. I wasn't present for my group meeting Tuesday,

because I was out of town with one of my fraternity brothers that are a student here at Oregon State.

My mentor, Professor Metoyer, and my DREU partner, Maduka, updated me on everything that went on in the

meeting. My mentor assigned me and my partner two separate jobs that we needed to have done for the project

by next week. My job was to create a web-based application to save the information of the users that will

take the survey, the frontend of the project. I used html to create a form for the user to submit the information

and I outputted the user information to the screen using PHP. My mentor created a practice MySQL database for

us to use. I created a table on MySQL to store the information from the users. I read a couple of tutorials on

inserting information from PHP to MySQL so I can be able to store all of the information from the user I had a

little trouble in connecting to the database but I was just making a simple mistake by using the wrong server

name. I haven't got a chance to insert any information on the table yet but I should have everything ready for

me to be able to. Next week, at the group meeting my mentor is going to check on the status of me and my partner

status of our jobs and make any necessary changes.

Week 4:

            These weeks are going by very fast. I'm going to start taking more pictures. I'm making progress

and I'm also learning with my part of the project. I made changes to my background info page so I can store

information easier and make it a lot easier for the user to choose the right choice. For example, I got the

list of degrees from Oregon State website and created a drop down list for the user to choose from. I also

made a drop down list for classification, gender, race, and ethnicity. I learned that using ethnicity and race

on a survey or any other application is the proper way to ask the user. When I finish cleaning up this info page,

I'm going to use next week to find out how I'm going to output the chart of the user(s) info and pull all the

info from the database and summarize.

Week 5:

            I was able to finish the background info page and store all of the data in the database. I also

created a background summary page that output the current data of the table and pull all users info from

database and summarize. I created a user validate page to see if the user code exist in the table once the

user input the code in the welcome page and if it do exists the browser continues to the background info page.

I was able to input the error on the top of the "Input User Code" page when the user enter the wrong User Code

and if the user already took the survey. I also found a way to update the user record when the user submit the

background info page.

Week 6 & 7:

            Time is almost coming to an end. I'm starting to feel like Oregon is my home. I love the weather.

Me and my partner Maduka was able to link up his work with what I have done to make an almost complete application.

We ran to a few problems when we combined our work but it didn't take no time to fix. We now have all the

questions and visualizations for the user survey. We will be entering the questions and images manually into

the database...yes...it will take a long time hahaha until we come up with a page to enter several images and

questions. I was able to create "Add a user" page so we can add a user through a simple form without going to

the database and entering it in manually. The grad student that's also over the project wanted me also to assign

a session template d to the user code once it is added to the database. A session template mainly contains a

certain order of the questions we are going to ask the user. Currently we just have two session templates.

Week 8:

I finished adding the option to choose which session template the administrator would want to

to assign for the new user. This was not that hard to do. I just used a session variable called UserID

that was already used earlier and created a simple insert query that will assign the

session template I.D to the User Table.

Week 9:

We are finishing up our program. Mainly checking for tiny errors and making sure everything is running

smoothly. Unfortunately we are not going to see our application in action because of the time constraint. We ran

a test pilot on Tuesday just to see what little things we need to do to make the program perfect. I am currently working

on my final report and my presentation that will be presented next Thursday. Time is definitely coming to an end.

Week 10:

LAST WEEK!!!! This will be my last journal entry. I had a fun yet challenging experience at Oregon State

University. I finished my presentation and my final report that will be posted on my website later today. I will be

doing my presentation today. Thanks to my mentor and all of the grad students that didn’t think twice in

lending out a helping hand.  I met so many nice people that’s eager to have fun. Thanks to DREU for giving me a chance to

challenge myself and giving me the chance to get the hands on experience that will definitely be a major factor in Grad School.