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 Weekly Reflection

     I can’t believe this was the last week!  Devon and I got everything finished and ready for testing.  We had a lot of long days this week but it was ultimately worth it as everything came together.  We even took home 3rd in the poster pitch competition!  This truly was an incredible experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.

 Daily Reflections

Monday

     This week was basically all systems go.  We had to finish up absolutely everything and get a working model for Friday.  Monday was my longest day at just about 13 hours.  So Devon had the idea to make a demo mode to our app so it would fire a pending survey right away instead of waiting for the alarm algorithm.  She began work on that while I made sure to finish up the front end development.  Most of my day on Monday was spent recoloring and resizing the images Alex had sent.  He had sent them in one color for the Microsoft Band, however for the app we could be more colorful so I fired up Photoshop and got to work.  Another thing I spent time on was the seekbar for question 1.  It is a seemingly easy concept but for some reason my code wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.  I figured it out and it looked awesome! I think Kay was quite pleased with it.

Tuesday

     I received the rest of the images from Alex for the app in stages throughout the morning, so I quickly recolored and resized them for our meeting with Katie.  Devon and I were both so nervous that Katie would hate everything but she loved it!

Wednesday

     I began the day by completing the exit survey for the REU experience.  Then we had the exit interview with Dr. Liu and overall it went well.  I then worked on the application’s icon.  I made it to coordinate with the other icon and match the color scheme for the app.  It looks pretty snazzy if I do say so myself.  A picture of it can be seen below.  We then had our final seminar.  It was on careers outside of academia with a PhD.  This was the workshop that I was looking forward to as I am most likely going to go to industry after I get my PhD.  I really liked what all three panelists were doing.  Devon and I then researched an issue we were having with the radio buttons.  In Android Studio, the radio buttons have to be direct children of the radio group in order for only one of them to be selected, so by putting them in the table rows, they were no longer direct children.  This took some researching, but we figured it out using listeners and everything works correctly now.

*For some reason uploads aren’t working so I’ll try later

Thursday

     We began our day with a meeting with Kay and Majdah.  We showed them everything we had and they seemed happy.  We spent most of our day preparing for Friday.  It took us about 3 hours to print our name tags.  Devon and I were both afraid of the laser cutter because it is so expensive and we didn’t want to mess it up.  But we both printed very nice name tags.  A picture of mine can be seen below.  We then went to the library and spent 3 hours printing our poster.  Everything was fine at first and then I tried to print another copy and that’s when things went wrong.  The colors weren’t coming out right and we tried all 3 printers!  I finally added a watermark to the poster and it made it better but not right.  Devon and I just accepted that was the best we could do.

*For some reason uploads aren’t working so I’ll try later

Friday

     We went to the poster pitch presentation early to set up.  Everything went really well and we took home 3rd!  I managed to get checked out of the apartment on time and get to the airport okay.  Getting home was another story.  I was flying on United but both of my flights were cancelled because of a ground stop in Chicago.  However, the only way to Northwest Arkansas is through Chicago on Untied, so I had to rebook on American and reroute through Dallas.  I finally got to Arkansas at about 1am and my bags didn’t make it!  They were still in Indianapolis because they weren’t transferred properly 🙁 .  I finally got my bags back two days later so all is good.

*For some reason uploads aren’t working so I’ll try later

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