To New Beginnings

It has been a fun time at RIT, but the chapter of my undergraduate career is now being closed. With that in mind, I will have time to focus on my personal projects. For those who have been following me, the intent of this blog was mainly to document projects that I found interesting that are going on in school. Now that I am leaving school, I will be looking to change the direction of my blog or even creating a new one that focuses on more of a broader spectrum of ideas and topics. But, it should be known, that I will not stop blogging. I enjoy documenting my life, and having the ability to share new things that I have learned. With the new skills that I have obtained at RIT, I feel empowered to move forward in life and make something of myself.


This post is to celebrate and share that potential for a new beginning, and to ask you all to please bare with me, as I do some "web" housekeeping.


Till then,
Ihudiya

Creating a Wiki

Today I began working on a new side project. It's a wiki! I am using a template called TikiWiki. I decided to host the wiki myself instead of using a free platform as it would be a great learning experience and I liked the ability to have total control when editing the wiki. My target users are teachers, parents, and students. The purpose of the site will be to post lesson plans or activities students can use when working with a tiny computer called a Pico Cricket. As a Women in Computing Ambassador I was responsible for making mini games with Pico Crickets. Making the games were fun, but I began to realize that there wasn't a specific source that included plenty of options to use the Pico Cricket. So here I am today creating wiki to do just that! Once the wiki is set-up I will be emailing schools and websites that have posted one or two lesson plans and ask if they can post to my site. Collaboration is key, so I am excited to see where this venture will go. I will keep you posted :D

10 Things You Should Know When In an RIT OLPC Course

Here is a list of 10 Tips in order to be successful in OLPC at RIT.

This is in no particular order:

1. Know the basic commands to freenode
2. Know who Richard Stallman is
3. Become familiar with the history OLPC
4. Learn the basic commands to build a wiki page
5. Know how to write an email [that can motivate and is understandable]
6. Become familiar with Python
7. Keep HCI in mind when designing a program
8. Be persistent
9. Be patient
10. Work Hard

10.1 Above all have fun and gain from this experience

Created by the Blocku Team: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Blocku

Blocku

Have you heard of Blocku! My Team in OLPC is currently working on a game called Blocku. Blocku is a puzzle game geared towards 4th grade students around the world. Students have the opportunity to play the game independently, and with friends. Teachers can use it to evaluate learned concepts in their classroom. It is easy to learn, and we have been working hard these past 10 weeks to present our project. From creating the name, creating lesson plans, and coding the material, the Blocku team (Mark, Fran, Ariel, and myself) have been working hard to bring this game to fruition. While we have a long path ahead of us, we have made many achievements this quarter.

Check us out sometime on our wiki: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Blocku

OLPC Course Overview

This Winter Quarter, instead of taking a stereotypical course that provides me the opportunity to focus on my programming skill set, I have decided to take a Special Topics Course concerning One Laptop Per Child.

Originally, I was signed up to take a JavaScript course, but after talking about the Special Topic course to friends and family, I realized that signing up for it would be a good decision. I enjoy helping people, and the OLPC course provided me the opportunity to use my skill set to help students who are learning about computers. Who would think, I would learn so much more.

The first day of the course, I was pleasantly surprised that the 11 week quarter "Craziness" of RIT would not be affecting our work in this course. Our professor stressed on producing quality work that can easily be handed off to the Open Source Community.

Speaking of Open Source Community, that was yet another pleasant surprise. We would be learning about the Open Source Community and be involved with the membership throughout the quarter.

Lastly, I learned we were going to get our hands dirty and learn a new programming language called Python. I am eager to start programming in this language, as it is a HOT language in the market.


-Wish me luck :D

LinkedIn - Is It A Fake Networking Tool?

Have you gotten a job on LinkedIn? Or, has LinkedIn effective marketing campaign persuaded you that having a profile on their website will make you appealing towards employers in your industry.

I would like to think that the latter clearly describes LinkedIn. As a college student I have opened my account and connected with friends that I have on Facebook. This social networking tool is redundant if you contact those same people on facebook.

But, in order to play devils advocate, LinkedIn does give users the feeling of being professional when posting information. It is clearly not a place to post wild drunken night pictures, or to create MySpace status's like @DMALL. But I am not sold on LinkedIn.

I will say it is a place where you can link with old coworkers who you do not want to reveal a lot of your personal life to, but in terms of jobs I have yet to obtain a job through LinkedIn. Additionally, it would be more profitable if I kept in contact with those professional coworkers instead of having them as a LinkedIn friends. In addition, a LinkedIn friend who may obtain updates on my change of profile, but would never hear from me.

In conclusion, I will keep my LinkedIn profile as it is a great way to brand myself as a professional. I will however probably only return to the site to add friends and maybe update my resume. I think employers are using this tool as another way to spy on you.

In the end, I don't expect anything great from this tool, but removed features found in facebook and myspace.

i.e: Another Limited Profile :D

End of Java Tutorial Project

I am sure your curious on how it all came about. Well, don't worry I will have the tutorial posted on my website. I just wanted to take the time to say I really learned a lot. I learned to never allow someone to stop me from speaking my mind. Making sure to have other people double check printed work, and to NEVER leave a printing shop without checking your work. (LONG STORY :D). I appreciated each of my team members, and even though we were not always cohesive, we respected one another and came together as a team.

If we had more time we would implement more features to our project and lessons, but unfortunately because of the time constraint we were not able to do those things. I think it should be stressed that working on a programming assignment it was necessary to set deadlines, and always cross check each other. It was also necessary to document and record all information.

In the end I am very proud and happy of the group that I was in. I wish them all the very best and success in their future endeavors. I have attached an image of our poster presentation of our final design.

Implementation

Once we determined our mock-up design, it was decided that we would create a template design of the tutorial that each person could use to create their own lesson that they were assigned. We made sure to include JavaDoc Documentation to allow the entire team to understand all parts. Once the template tutorial was created, creating our lessons were very straight forward. Listed below are sample images of each tutorial.

Objects Sample & Logic Sample

Loops Sample & Collections Sample

Usability Testing

Mock-ups of Tutorial

Our professor wanted us to emphasis certain Java topics we learned in class as we created our Java Tutorial. With that in mind, we knew we had to include 2D Graphics, Java Beans, Cryptography, Security, etc.

Together we decided to emphasize coding structure, provide animations, and plain text to teach lessons. Pictured below are two of our mock-ups. We decided to go with the later.

Figure 1: Mock-up Image 1

Figure 2: Mock up Image 2

As you can see Figure 1, had the sample code text pane sharing a panel with the Animation Panel. In figure 2, the sample code text pane is located near the lesson/question panel.

Design of Product

Once we determined our brand, we were sent off with the task of determining what kind of product we wanted to present. With both primary and secondary research, and understanding the scope of the project we determined we wanted to highlight the following topics in our tutorial:

Logic

• If/Else
• Switch

Loops

• For
• While/Do While

Collections

• Array
• ArrayList

Objects

• Constructors
• Accessors and Mutators
  

Creation of Brand and Logo

Through several heated meetings and mock-ups my team finally decided on a logo, and how we wanted to brand ourselves. We wanted our audience to see that we were cohesive, research forward, diverse and a talented programming team. Together we agreed on the name Connect4.
We used analogies and symbols commonly seen in the game Connect Four produced by Hasbro. Our final design came out as follows:

Determination of Project Topics

Once assigned to our groups in Team-Based Application Programming we were given the task of researching what key concepts new programmers had a hard time understanding. Stated below is an excerpt from our paper describing our major research method:

During a regularly scheduled Java programming class, students were split into groups of two and three, and assigned an interviewer. Students were varied in ages, and provided many explanations on why they were taking this course. As it is a required course for the Information Technology (IT) and Network Security and System Administration (NSSA) degrees, students found in this class were either taking the course for the first time, retaking the course, transferred into Rochester Institute of Technology, or taking the course after failed attempts at taking a higher Java programming course. Attending this class session provided us with a diverse pool of responses.

Our group interviewed a total of nine students. It was our aim to make the students feel comfortable by building a repertoire in order for them to provide useful and honest responses. At the end of the day, our team came together and reported our findings, in addition to articles with relevant topics in order to further understand college-wide programming issues.

Group Dynamics

After talking to each of my group members we all came to the realization that our dynamics were of the following characteristic.

Diya - Designer, Programmer, HCI, Lead Researcher

Derek - Lead Designer, Programmer, HCI, Researcher

Jeff - Programmer, Motivator, HCI, 2nd Lead Researcher

Shawn - Lead Programmer, HCI, Researcher

Connect4

During my senior year at RIT I decided to take the class, Team-Based Application Development. The class provided me the opportunity to link with other IT students and learn additional topics concerning Java. Being that this was an upper level course, a lot of the topics were self taught. Some of the Java topics we taught ourselves are: 2dgraphics, animation, java beans, gui's, cryptography, security. We also learned how to performance tune our programs and CVS. Once these topics were mastered, we were grouped into teams of four in order to create a Java Tutorial for lower level Java programming students.

My teams name was connect4, and with our diversity, respect for one another, and cohesive nature we were able to produce a logo, tutorial program, design document, and a technical report.

I have decided to use this space to touch on the various parts of our project, and several other projects to come. I will include images, and hopefully have the tutorial available to view.

Week 10 in Website Design and Implementation

After experiencing this class, and trying to find a coop. I learned that I must continue to practice, record all of my sketches of websites, and keep doing photoshop tutorials. I met a lot of great people, and learned a lot from them. Over the summer, I will continue to learn php, and making template websites to use for interviews. My goal is to have 10 templates posted on my RIT web address. I hope all works out well. Till then, I will continue to post new things I learned in order to keep record of my improvement.

Project 2 in Website Design and Implementation

Here are my six links:

1. Home page - script for the pull down menu.
2. Home page - contains a script for a picture to pop up when you click on my image
3. The Clinic'ue - contains a script for the drop-down menu for services
   
4. The Clinic'ue - contains a PHP contact form
   
5. Home page - contains a time and date script
6. Contact page - contains a time and date script

Typography on a Webpage

It was hard finding a poem. I had this great idea of finding a love poem and having hearts in the background, but it was hard finding a FAMOUS author. There were tons of website where users could post poems they created, but I wanted something well known. I also, didn't want to restrict myself to website that was provided in class.

I found this sad love poem by Alexander Pushkin. The poem is actually in Russian but was translated. I found the translation here.

It's a really sad poem, and creating the site around it, I wanted to keep it simple. I was disappointed though, because I wanted to use fonts that were similar to someone writing a letter. I felt limited on only using Verdana, Times New Roman, etc in order to make sure that it could be seen in all browsers.

Outside of that, the page is very simple, but I created it in this manner to make the poem have impact. I also made use of positioning elements.

In terms of html, I learned to use em instead of percentage when using relative positioning.

I will search google, and post ways to get around the font issue, besides posting a picture of the font you want to use. I will get back to you with more details.

Here is the link to my page: http://people.rit.edu/~ifo0912/409/poem.html

CSS Zen Websites

I checked out CSS Zen Garden and I found two sites, one that I liked and another I disliked. Both used a good amount of CSS, and after looking at a lot of the examples on the site, I realized that only the text was seen in the source. Images and the entire layout was placed on the webpage through CSS.

Bad Site:
Maybe its because I am not a lego fan,
but I really disliked this example of CS. The text is
too ackward and plays with my eyes. It doesn't
make use of its whitespace in a manner that is appealing.
Also its navigation is close to the middle of the page,
which I find ackward. Overall, there is too much going
on for me to notice the text.





Good Website:
What can I say, when it comes to designing a website,
I go the more professional route, and I was shocked
after viewing this site. It jumps out of you, and the
use of colors, and creative images, makes it really cool.
I need to practice more on splicing images, and having it
look together on a website.

Personal Critque of Website

I personally like my website, but I have much to learn in terms of graphically appealing images. I need to format my banner so that it is the actual size that I want it on the page. This reduces seeing pixels when trying to stretch and reduce the image size.

Do you have any input about items I should work on?