This week in lab I searched for more bugs in PINATA and started working with the code. I decided to add a reset-per-metric feature to the Notifications Manager or PINATA that resets all values such as for a specific notification, such as color preference, and details on position of the notification. In order to do this, I had to complete an HTML tutorial so that I could understand the code platform a little better. I also did a Google Chrome debugging tutorial that should help me in the future.
For fun this weekend I went to Patapsco State Park to hike! My best friend had an event at University of Pennsylvania on Sunday, so we met up there and I took her to the airport so that she could get back to school.
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This week I narrowed down and decided what I will be working on this summer. After a long meeting with Dr. Hurst on Monday, I've decided that I want to work on PINATA, a user-centered designed Chrome extension that can help individuals who experience issues accurately controlling a pointing device, such as mouse. Please see the "project" section for more details. I do not know JavaScript, PHP, CSS, or HTML, so after I made this decision I learned the basics of the said languages and looked through the existing code for PINATA. I also read over and took detailed notes over the Independent Study Report that Tejas Bhalerao wrote, who was the Master's student at UMBC who worked on this before me. I met with Dr. Hurst on Thursday in order to make a specific plan on what I want to work on and now have a game plan for the summer.
Some fun things I did this week was going to my first "Fika" that the Human-Computer Interaction Department hosts every Monday at 3pm. Fika is a Swedish tradition that is a coffee break (with sweet treats) introduced to the department by Dr. Mentis. Every Monday the department along with the undergraduate researchers meet in the coffee room to talk about a variety of topics. Since the Fika I went to was the first for many in the room, we introduced ourselves and wrote about our goals for the summer on the whiteboard in the room. The faculty explained that the goals with our names next to it stays there all summer and exists in order to push not only ourselves to achieve these goals, but to push and encourage others as well. After chatting and getting to know each other, we wrote a list of topics labeled "summer wishlist" that we want to discuss at our future Fikas, such as "what is research?", "graduate school", and "culture day". Everyday after work I usually go to the gym, but I decided that on Thursday I would go hiking at Sugarloaf Mountain, a mountain about an hour away with lots of foresty trails. Checkout some of the pictures in the "my travels" section. Last Sunday I also went to Great Falls Park in Virginia to hike, so check those pictures out as well! That's it for this week! I arrived to Maryland by car on Thursday after a very long road trip from Texas! After a bit of exploring over the weekend (checkout the "my travels" section of this website), Francine (DREU- paired student) and I got to meet Dr. Hurst on Monday and had a nice chat over breakfast. I then got to meet the team at the weekly Monday meeting in the PAD Lab. A group of us then took off to the University of Maryland Medical Center to observe and photograph the physical therapy students at work. Their goal was to design a clay model for their patient that would help fix their patient's need when this clay model is 3D-scanned and printed. On Wednesday, Will took us to the Digital Harbor Foundation center to meet with some of the staff there and tour the center. This center is attached to Digital Harbor High School and has many 3D printers and is staffed primarily by high school students trained in this technology. The rest of the week I read many research papers, most of which are co-authored by Dr. Hurst about AUI (adaptive user interface) pointer technology and 3D printing AT (assistive technology) applications. I also learned how to print using a 3D printer called Printrbot using the Cura software, and learned how to create my own 3D design to be printed using tinkercad.
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