It was a very busy week for me. I made travel arrangements with DREU way before I knew I had to start my research late, so I still had to fly back to my university during my research. Packing was a lot of work! I went back to my university to grab the rest of my stuff before I start my study abroad program on the 30th. During this week, I finished up my final report and wrapped up some of my work too, and met with my advisor for the last time. It has been a really great experience! I really enjoyed working on my research and discovered a lot about the field and about myself too. I’m very thankful for DREU for granting me this opportunity and my mentor who has been very supportive of me this summer.

I started working on the frontend. Frontend development is what I’ve really been interested in, both the UI designing and the frontend coding, so actually getting into it was fun. But it took me quite a lot of time to figure out Bootstrap, though. I also continued with literature reviews for the bigger research and noting down some papers useful for this project particularly.

We had another web design meeting this week. We decided to start working on the frontend first while waiting for the AWS to get set up. I started learning Bootstrap to use it for the project as it’s in the tech stack already. I also spent time reviewing and practicing HTML and CSS, since I haven’t had much chance to actually use them before, as well as learning new JavaScript concepts for the frontend.

I finished the Django tutorials! I have a decent understanding of the basics of the framework now, which helps with understanding the codebase a lot. Currently, we are not working on the backend stuff because some team members are trying to figure out the configuration for AWS, where we are going to host the website. It’s pretty complicated and quite a lot of work, so hopefully when that’s sorted out we can hop back to working on features! We had another web design meeting this week, discussing what everyone has been working on and possibly new ideas.

Making good progress with Django. Some other team members and I are continuing with other tasks such as designing the web interface. We had our first web design meeting this week and discussed the current progress, as well as brainstorming new ideas for the website. I continued with literature reviews and I’m also starting to brainstorm what I want to be on the final report, since this is a part of a larger project and not a standalone research.

Continuing with Django and literature reviews! I found some very interesting papers that seem super relevant to the research so I’m excited to show them to my mentor.

My mentor is away at a conference this week, so no meeting with her, but I still continued the weekly check-in meeting with the rest of the team. I think I have a good hang of where the project is at at this point, meeting with the team members has helped a lot. I finished learning some core Python concepts and I have started embarking on the Django journey! My goal is to follow tutorials to make a blog web app with core features such as log in, log out, posting, etc. in order to get familiar with Django as well as the backend of web apps. During our last meeting, my mentor explained to me her vision of the larger project that this project will be a part of, which is to design online platforms to encourage playful caring acts, so I also did some literature reviews on the topic.

During the first week, I met with my mentor to discuss the project I will be working on and my tasks for the week. I met with other team members who are working on the project to discuss the current status of the project, as well as get acquainted with the project. It has been running for a while, so there is a lot to catch up on. Because the project uses some programming languages and technologies I haven’t had much experience in such as Python and Django, I spent the rest of the week learning them. I also spent some time reading HCI research papers, to get acquainted with the work of the lab and the project I’m working on.