March 1 2019

ACM Projects March Update

We’re a month into ACM Projects, here’s what our teams have been up to!


BestStudent

"The team began to experiment android studio’s, additionally, the type of colors to utilizes. The frontend and backend have created separate channels and board to discuss internally on the situation. This is week 3, where the team really began to research and discovery on their own and with their respective end. This week’s roadblocks were understanding fire base, and understanding GitHub push and pull. More concepts were added to the board, and discussion among the team have increased, so overall this week has been good!"

StudyMates

"Our team has been split so that four people working on the back end and two people working on the front end. This decision came to be after our AT&T mentor suggested we spend more man power on the backend design. Although we technically could be more efficient by moving around some of my teammates we decided it’d be best if everyone assigned themselves to work on things they have never worked on before. Thankfully my teammates understood the importance of learning and arranged themselves to work on their respective assignments.

Our front end is currently working on flowcharts to describe the user experience, and our backend has already sorted out what user info will be stored in the database. I hope that after this build night we can start cranking out some code. My team definitely has some very smart people but it seems like midterms has slowed us down slightly. However, it seems like we have a strong plan as to what we need to accomplish to get the MVP.

I have also recently let them know that we need to meet outside of the build nights that I’m available to be there with them. Although I’m struggling to keep my fingers off the code I’m more than excited to see ourselves in two weeks and see how we’ve started to make actual progress in our programming because up until this point we’ve been thoroughly planning."

Recipe Helper

"The front end team has been able to develop a very basic home page with a simple search user interface. They are using the React.js web framework. Everyone on the front end team is new to front end development so it has been quite the learning process. Unfortunately, there was an issue with git commits and some members were unable to run their code. They resolved it by rolling back to older versions of the code.

The back end team decided on all the different endpoints to expose from the Recipe API. They also started learning about how to make API calls using the Node.js HTTP module. One major roadblock was that the members had to use a third party API host to access their API. Fortunately, they were able to obtain a free subscription to the host with an API key.

Moving forward, the front end is aiming to create a minimal interface for users to enter their ingredients. More generally, they want to familiarize themselves with all the elements of React they need to know to develop the solution. The back end is aiming to finish writing basic API calls from the Recipe API and move on to user login and authentication."

Stay Woke!

"Define! Define! Define! These past 3 build nights, The Stay Woke! has been focused on product strategy and defining our product. We have taken a UX approach, first defining what we are building, who we are building it for, and why we are building it.

Bridging the gap between the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ our team established a problem statement: We are creating a news application that utilizes data visualization about current issues to allow people to stay informed on these current issues.

We then defined the ideal user. We let this user represent a segment of our target audience: Robert. 21. Student. Hispanic. Hardworking. Knowledge-Seeking. Buys from Target, JC Penny, & Walmart. Needs to be politically informed. Wants widest set of views. Wants to make informed political decisions & have informed political conversations.

Our user, Robert laid the foundation for determining our use cases. From this, began the requirements generation process. We sourced base requirements from our problem statement.

These requirements included general broad level requirements such as: * Setting up a NodeJS server * Individual article page mockup & development * Make API calls to NYT API for articles

Our team defined what was important for Robert to do/see and from there we further defined requirements. In the coming weeks, we look forward to building out the rest of our product."

Playlist Converter

"Entering the third week Playlist converter is still in the planning phase in the project so far. The front end team has drawn up and has come up with several wire frames, and logo designs final selection for logo and wireframes have yet to be decided. The back end team has been able to set up the Xcode on all computers as well as completing the logical flow of how the playlist converter will function step by step. The logic written will be discussed and will be decided on next build night. Rode blocks so far has been team has been becoming familiar with Xcode and learning the two APIs apple and Spotify in order to utilize the tools both APIs have to offer. Final road block team has been having is bridging our understanding when It comes to learning swift a coding language, but should become each week we work with it. Not behind in tasks, but our team could be better with time management and completing expected goals this week."

Smart Lecture Notes

"By week 3, the Smart Lecture Notes back-end team has made huge headway on OCR-ing the handwritten text on the page using Google Vision. Right now, they have a Node server set up that will take requests and output a JSON document with the x-y coordinate of each word. In order to help accuracy, which is only average at the moment, they will also be implementing another API to pre-process the image into being grayscale with high contrast before going through OCR. The back-end team is also working on setting up MongoDB to store the data for each photo for each user, something that they are going through tutorials for at the moment as NoSQL is a very new concept. There were also some authentication issues at the beginning that slowed progress for the back-end."

The front-end team has a finalized design for the app and are able to start coding it to React Native. To do the original design, the team used Figma, a great wireframing/mockup application. As a team, we had to decide about user gestures on the screen such as where to use scrolling versus swiping and in what directions, and there was some disagreement on these things in particular, but we came to a consensus on the final design. So far, there is one screen implemented, and it looks really great!"