Weekend, Week 14

Today, I spent my time tuning up the analysis section of the Design Documentation (on Sharepoint, should be close to finished), and worked on the Design Review Documentation, as well as the Design Review power point slides. A number of changes had to be made to the slides, particularly updating the accomplishments that I had made over the semester (they unfortunately weren't too many, but I had to jump in alone), as well as rearranging the slides to incorporate comments made by the last panel of design reviewers (matrix of design review follow up found on Sharepoint).

Weekend, Week 13

This week, I spent my time looking up information on the T:/ drive in order to prepare for the upcoming design documentation. The necessary information can be found, but unfortunately is quite scattered (some being on Sharepoint, some being on the T:/ drive). The analysis section is shaping up, as well as the formatting of the document.

Weekend, Week 12

Today, I spent my time working on the Maintenance Manual (found on the T:/ drive) to help ensure that the readability and flow of the same were good. I also spent some time today rolling back certain changes I had made (specifically to the design) (also on the T:/ drive) of the Java applet.

Weekend, Week 11

Today, I spent my time testing the various changes I'd made to the code. Many of my changes had been made outside of the actual program, and today I spent my time integrating and testing. The splash screen has yet to be installed, which is the one change I've made that has yet to be integrated into the applet.

Weekend, Week 10

Today I reworked some sections of code to make the program run faster on the website (currently some parts were running slowly, due to poor design decisions). Particularly that of the sound lookup, which currently runs about 1 sec faster per lookup. This may not be necessary, but if the project should expand, it'll make a lot more sense to have the whole program run more efficiently.

Weekend, Week 9

Today, I continued working on design documentation, particularly that pertaining to the process flow of the application. The information was there, cleaning it up to make it readable and flow well was the problem.

Weekend, Week 8

Today I worked on improving the documentation; and will continue to do so for the next few weeks, since the basic functionality of the project exists already, and I have yet to receive a reply for any of my emails/calls to the project partner.

Weekend, Week 7

This weekend, I spent my time debugging the code (upon trying to compile it) and found that the new features introduced last semester had not been completed. I spent a lot of time simply identifying errors, and trying my best to fix them. More debugging will be done soon.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, I have yet to receive an email from the teacher assigned to the project.

Weekend, Week 6

Today, I spent my time understanding exactly how the word is synthesized into speech. It is done with great hassle, since it has to be done nearly manually. The word list is parsed automatically, but the sounds have to be created using a utility. The sentence, from what I can see, is picked individually from the internet, and then synthesized into speech. This is very tedious, and I'm looking into how to make this more automated. Also, some of the sounds (during initial testing) were performed by a regular human voice. Further testing is going to occur this week.

Weekend, Week 5

Today, I started editing the code for appearance. The goal was to make the program more appealing to those of a younger audience. I worked on offline changes, and included a splash screen that lasts for 5 seconds. The design of the splash screen along with the overall layout changes took around 4 hours (from creation to addition to the code).

Week 4 - Project Partner Email Sent

Today, I sent forth the project partner email to the teacher contact in charge of the SpellBowl project, and eagerly await a reply from which I will be able to decide on the direction that the project should take.

Lab 3 - Code of Conduct

09/09/09

Today, we met as a team to come up with a code of conduct to be used. We met as teams (I joined US Map) and then put our ideas together. The final result was this: Link

Lab 2 - Project Partner Visit

09/02/09

Today, we went to the project partner to see the school, and meet with the principal. We toured the grounds, and learned about the grades that the projects were targeted towards.

Placeholder - Lecture 2

08/31/09

Design 1 Lecture

Weekend 1

8/30/09

Today, I went over the documentation for the Spell Bowl project, to assess the current situation. I found these things:

1. The project is near deployment
2. There are some minor bugs that require fixes
3. The new word list needs updating
4. Voices need to be standardized

The link to the public SpellBowl site.

Lab 1

8/26/09

Lab1 - Introduction to the team, project, sample design exercise

Today, we went through the introduction of the team and the projects involved. We also went through and assigned basic roles for the team and projects.

The project partner: KES (Klondike Elementary School)

The team members are:
Professor Gray - Advisor
Charles - T/A
Michelle link
River link
Kelli link
Taylor link
Baseer link
Jacob link
James link
Shriram link

I was assigned as the Project Leader for the SpellBowl Project.

We also performed a design exercise, where we divided into teams; I was teamed with Michelle, River, and Kelli.
The design spec:

We took to a very productive brainstorm session, remembering exactly who the target market was, and with some information gained from the project partner meeting, we finalized this design:


Next week - Project Partner meeting! Visit to KES!

First Post - Lecture 1

8/24/09

Today was the first lecture; we covered the basics of EPICS, as an introduction to new members.