With only a few weeks left, it’s time to engage systems to full throttle and jump into lightspeed. The program is nearing its end (it feels like), so the team and I have been in overdrive in order to attain tangible deliverables by the end of the program.
Monday June 25
Today I worked on the ShareLatex document quite a bit. The sources are flowing in nicely, and I discovered a great database called Statista which provides numerous examples of quantitative data studies. There are a plethora of statistics about smartphone and application usage. There were few studies conducted regarding pregnant women and application usage, but the data I did find was still useful. I read a few papers in preparation for tomorrow’s reading meeting, and I must say the paper about Baby Steps was well written. I may use that as the paradigm for the paper that we are writing. I hope we are able to present a paper, but day by day it is looking like we will have to do a workshop of some sort. Swift application development is getting difficult and Arash, Ray, and I consult each other daily for problem resolution. I hope that we can meet with James either tomorrow or Wednesday to solidify end goals and determine weekly goals. That’s all for today, I know it’s not very interesting but un fortunately that’s how it is some days.
Tuesday June 26
Today began with our weekly meeting for readings. We had quality discussion about paper formats and whether or not we would change anything about the study done. I would not have altered the study, for its graphs were integrated nicely and all information was relevant. I spent the rest of the day peer reviewing, working on ShareLatex, and helping Arash attempt to debug his program. It was really difficult, for we wanted to delete recordings that were stored and could not muster up a way to do it. I came in with an object oriented design approach and quickly learned that Swift just isn’t set up the way I am used to programming in C++. We implemented arrays and then tried to delete the stored recordings but that would not work either. It seemed like a relatively easy procedure based on the YouTube tutorials, but it was quite the head scratcher. After we spent some time debugging we went to go meet with James. It was a nice break from the diligent coding we have been doing as a group. In the meeting we discussed using our app as a third party application in order to gather posts, but Facebook’s updated privacy policy makes that near impossible to do. James suggested that our application then act as an interceptor, so that it takes information and then posts it to Facebook or other Social Media. I really liked this idea and the other members of the team agreed it would be effective and it would not have to jump through as many hoops, but retention may be an issue. We concluded the day with more bug fixing and testing.
Wednesday June 27
Not much to inform you about my updates today, sorry to say. However, I was exposed to the presentation and poster methods I would be using for the upcoming symposium. James (my mentor) out on a fantastic workshop today that went over poster design. Effective templates were presented. I got excited just thinking of the possible conferences I could present at and how professional our poster would look. I learned about the plotter that the Wells Library has and was informed that we would be able to print massive posters. James stated that Powerpoint is one of the more effective platforms to utilize for poster design, so when it comes time to do so I will take his word for it. The rest of the day was spent peer reviewing and watching tutorials on how to construct a photo capture and retrieval system for our application. We playfully bickered over a name for the application (MommaGram vs DocuMom) and ultimately decided to agree to disagree. Despite this slight hiccup the future looks auspicious and we are chugging along in development.
Thursday June 28
What a busy day! The morning was spent again watching a never ending stream of tutorials. Many developers have idiosyncratic ways of creating this application and I could not pinpoint a uniform template or style to adhere to. I may just try to find one in a textbook and follow that stringently so that no discrepancies occur. The tutorials began to drive me slowly created, so I did some more editing in the ShareLatex document. one of the pee reviewers suggested to replace “moms” with “mothers” to sound less informal and make the paper more research appropriate. The appropriate lexis should be used within a discourse community, so to abide by this I changed more diction in the document and learned some more nomenclature in the application development and motherhood communities. The paper looks better and better with each passing day and I hope we have something exceedingly spectacular by the end of this program. Next, we had our weekly meeting with the other research group and picked some amazing papers to read for next week. They should benefit both groups substantially. The other REUs in the group gave us name suggestions and assisted us in narrowing down our selections. DocuMom, my suggestion, was met with negative reaction and cynicism. There is no pleasing everyone I suppose, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. At the end of the day we met with a professor Ray had been in touch with and he introduced us to some online classes taught by Stanford. He also gave us graduate school suggestions, which was helpful. We need to learn more about Core Data and Swift Nuances, by I think it is possible. Ray is presenting tomorrow, so we plan to help her prepare.
Friday June 29
What an excellent day for feedback! Ray’s presentation went fantastically and we received lots of great feedback from all of the REUs. We did a documentation activity using the smartphones and we wanted to see which facets of applications hindered accessibility when they were used with one hand. This simulated someone carrying a baby. Lots of participants said that the note taking app was helpful, and that Siri was easily accessible but often times inaccurate. We will be sure to note that for our application design. People got tired rather quickly because they were carrying objects for child simulation, and they agreed that the incorporation of microinteractions was both feasible and pragmatic. Today I also looked up what conferences we should be submitting to, and found a lot of interesting ones. I will attach them at the end of this blog. The program seems almost over, and it is began to make me a bit sad. I have enjoyed working here and enjoy research. Well, I will continue to enjoy the glory days while they are occurring. Until next week!