My first week in the Virginia Tech computer science department for the DREU program has gone well so far. There is another student working with Dr. Perez-Quinones as well who is from Puerto-Rico, he seems eager to learn some of the same processes I am, and is pretty easy to bounce ideas off of. The project I am currently working on it called Virtual Town Square, which is a news collection site for local places and people. The current project holds some issues based upon user feedback and I have been asked to develop a new User Interface as well as do a bit of work with the user and the servers to optimize the usage of the website. This week I have worked on two prototypes. The first prototype I created was used in a discussion to obtain ideas for the second from Dr. Perez, Rafael, and Bobby (a graduate student in the department). The only real issues I have come across is working with JQuery, which is something I have never used before, as well as PHP. I am in the process of trying to understand a JQuery plug-in that creates a slider and trying to keep the CSS of bootstrap from overwriting the CSS of the slider bar. I feel as though this summer will give me a true understanding of what it takes to pull together multiple languages in order to fully portray the needs of the client-base, as well as working with others to understand exactly how different types of users interact with different features of a webpage. This experience is something that I think will strengthen my decision toward becoming a web designer, and continue my work with research in the technological world. I’m really enjoying everything so far and cannot wait to get started with some server-side work soon.
This past week has been a lot about getting things to actually work as opposed to being static HTML and CSS. I learned that not all API’s are perfect and sometimes they can totally mess up what your goal in a feature is. I found this out after attempting to implement a slider bar that interacted with images into one of my prototypes for the VTS webpage. The slider bar documentation was not very detailed and after trying to figure out the markup and JQuery, had to receive some help from a professor at Virginia Tech in order to get it running, but now it runs smoothly, and will be a viable asset to the prototype. I have also learned this past week that JQuery is very important when working with BootStrap from Twitter. I had not used JQuery or PHP prior to this research opportunity and have discovered that they are both very useful and can make things run smoother and more easily. Dr. Perez gave me a template system to use for the PHP work I am doing, which makes learning the PHP part of the project much simpler. Currently I have one full prototype for demonstrating and the next week or so is going to be used to finalize the remaining 4 prototypes. The prototypes are all different based on different suggests from different people I have spoken to about the project in the department, all of which are very good ideas based on what different types of users would look for in the website. The goal for the next 2 weeks is getting all of the prototypes ready for demonstration and all the “articles” established into the PHP files for demonstration.
Over week three I finished refining the 4 prototypes that I had already created as well as using the PHP template system in conjunction with my already created HTML and CSS files. This template system took a bit of time to learn as it was based on arrays in PHP which I had never seen before and required some help on his end to get some things running. I learned how to get a program to create a local host on my computer to allow me to use these PHP files and generate fake content for my prototypes. This allowed me to create smaller HTML files and get more thing implemented in week three.
During week four I finished up most of my prototypes and I had one almost complete prototype with a few bugs. Those bugs will be researched and fixed in the next coming weeks.
During week five I continued to finish up most of my prototypes to a functioning place. I received an email asking me to participate in a Responsible Conduct in Research training program requirement for them. This was an online course through citiprogram.org, and had modules that had topics such as Mentor/Mentee relationships, advisors vs mentors, and other ethical topics that may arise during research projects. This training took me approximately 3 days to complete. We also set up a time to meet with Andrea, who is the principle investigator for the Virtual Town Square project. This is to take place on Monday of week 6.
During week 6 we met with Andrea and she had some good input, but mostly wanted to meet us and see what exactly we were working on. At this point in the program Rafael and I will start working on incorporating some of his visualization work into my prototypes. His Visualization will be more twitter and/or follower orientated and will be included in a couple different pages of my prototypes. I also met with Dr. Perez individually and demonstrated all of my prototypes, instead of one at a time, and we decided that the last prototype I worked on was the one we were mostly going to go with and decided that I should focus more on keep that same basic layout and creating different versions of it, including adding more color.
This week we met with the community leaders to go over our progress and get their input on improvements we could make. A lot of the time was spent talking about the twitter visualizations that Rafael is currently working on. His visualizations are taking words from twitter and displaying them in a way so that the number of times they are used in a database of tweets. He did one with the mentions, one with hash tags, and one with the actual words of the tweets. They all were very interesting. My current progress involves completing two prototypes per suggestions from the leaders as well as Dr. Perez. I will hopefully have these completed by the end of next week.
This week we learned about the Tapia Conference which is to take place in Seattle, WA in February and what we need to do to start working toward submitting for a poster session. I continued work with the Prototypes and have nearly completed all of the prototypes that will be used in the future. There are a couple of features that need a little more work, but should be finished up by the end of the program. Next week will focus on getting the paper for Tapia prepared for submission.
This past week, Rafael and I both worked on our final reports and a paper to send to Tapia. We also took some time out on Friday to go downtown to a local street festival that is held every year on the first weekend in August called Steppin’ Out. I, personally have gone every years since I was 2, but it was nice to take someone who have never been before. It is “the” festival of Blacksburg and there is always a bunch to do and see. This year was the first year I got a t-shirt since 1997. Here is a link to a local newspaper’s images of Steppin’ Out.
The final week was mostly used to reserach and write a paper for the Tapia Conference. I learned a lot about why VTS was created and under what pretenses. It was fascinating reading multiple papers that were published regarding virtual town squares and how they can be used to bring little local organizations together more easily. This experience has been a very rewarding one. Over the last 10 weeks I have learned a new language, JQuery, and how to put together a website that is both visually appealing and works out what the main objective of the webpage is. I have learned things this summer that I will be able to take with me in the last semester of schooling, as well as into my future career.