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!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
August 2017
Categories |