End of the year

Over the past year the Access Lecture team has done a lot of amazing things that were new to all of us.

In the beginning we

• Got to know each other and become a team
• Learned how to design surveys and interviews using non-biased/non-leading questions
• Talked to potential users to try and gather requirements
• Learned how to analyze data from surveys and interviews
• Learned how to use Objective-C and the XCode development environment
• Created mock-ups of the application

During the second quarter we

• Developed multiple prototypes to test out proposed features of Access Lecture
• Applied for multiple conferences
• Was accepted to present at multiple conferences
• Began making our posters

During the third quarter we

• Conducted usability tests with our prototypes
• Determined what needed to be fixed, changed, and added 
• Began implementing the changes
• Attended the 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference!
• Attended the 2011 Posters on the Hill event at the capital!

And finally, over this past summer we have

• Applied for the ACM ASSETS 2011 conference in Dundee, Scotland
• Got accepted into the ACM ASSETS 2011 conference in Dundee, Scotland!
• Continued development of the application
• Began a second round of testing
• Analyzed the results of the second round of testing
• Went back into development and addresses most of the feedback/concerns
• Created a new poster for the ASSETS conference
• And wrapped up the application for the summer and made sure there was enough documentation that the application would be easy to pick up again in the fall, whether it be us or another team that is working with the system.

We have done a lot and learned a lot over the course of this project. This was the first time I've ever worked on something that really had a purpose, and wasn't just for a grade or to display technical skills- we've been making something that real students could use in their classes. I think that's pretty amazing.

The experiences and opportunities that this project gave me have been invaluable and I'm really glad I was able to be a part of the Access Lecture team and work with Alex, Abhishek, and our professor.


Thank you all for a great year!

Lindsey

A Final Reflection: 700 hours of total development yields 700 units of awesome

Today marks the last day of my work as a full-time developer for the Access Lecture project. I have been working on the project with Lindsey and Abhishek since the beginning of fall quarter, both full- and part-time.

While reflecting on all that we've done and experienced, I came upon a question that I felt needed immediate solving:

How many hours of development does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop develop an awesome iPad application?

The answer? 700.
Now that we know the answer, let's make some Jeopardy questions from it!

The correct answer to each of these questions is: "What is 700 hours?"

1. The time it took us to make significant advances in helping visually impaired students actively participate in math and science courses.
2. A time period during which I learned about, conducted, designed, and analyzed usability tests.
3. How many hours I have spent and will spend traveling to the Richard Tapia, Posters on the Hill, and ASSETS Conferences!
4. How long I have been forced to stare at white™/shiny™/magical™ things.
5. The amount of time in which we managed to learn Objective-C, the iPhone SDK, and the principles of iOS development, as well as apply these technologies in advanced and innovative ways.
   
6. Time which I was fortunate enough to be able to spend forming valuable, long-lasting professional and personal connections.
7. A time frame in which I learned about many different technologies which unexpectedly came up during the development process. These include Quartz-2D, OpenGL ES, remote desktop methodologies, handling online client/server authentication, and many more.

If you answered "700 hours" to any of the following, you are wrong. Your answer must be in the form of a question; thanks for playing.

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In all seriousness, I am extremely thankful and appreciative that I received the opportunity to work on Access Lecture. It has truly been an invaluable experience, and has helped me both grow and expand personally and professionally.

During the course of my research this year, I have been exposed to the following for the first time:

• The general principles, practices, and processes involved in software engineering research.
• The academic research community, both the technical subset and the community as a whole.
• Attending conferences and presenting posters on my research.
  
• The non-technical elements which are necessary to make a large engineering project successful, such as usability and requirement gathering.
• Working closely and long-term within a small development team.
• The challenges which arise from having to unexpectedly and quickly adapt a software project. Such challenges have included:
  
• Completely reworking a feature on short notice
• Quickly and fully learning and implementing various methodologies and technologies
• Using preexisting technologies in innovative ways, and working within uncharted territory.

Needless to say, I am grateful to all parties who were involved in letting me experience all of these things. I would like to extend my utmost thanks and appreciation to:

• Our project adviser (whom I don't know if I should mention by name) - For being extremely supportive and understanding, leading the way throughout the process, and coming up with an idea for a system which I (speaking from first-hand experiences in my secondary education) truly believe can greatly improve academic conditions for visually impaired students.
• The AL Team (Lindsey and Ahbishek) - I don't even know where to begin with this one; there is too much to say! The team was great to work with; we certainly accomplished tasks at a level that we could not have accomplished individually.
  
• CREU (Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates) - For supporting our research and helping us receive the most from the experience.

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That's all for now! There is a very good chance that I will be continuing work on Access Lecture part-time in the fall, and there is still the ASSETS conference in Scotland to look forward to!

- Alex

Week 9 - Working on a Brand New Poster!

Hey everyone,

Last week Alex told you guys about our new plans for the notetaking system. We got everything working, and we thought we were done with notetaking until we tried putting the application on the device.  It turns out that the iPad simulator in XCode is not a good indicator of how well something will work on the iPad...in fact the application can run quite differently.

While notetaking was rather smooth on the simulator, when we tried it out on the device we were horrified. There was a pretty bad delay when writing, and everything came out angular i.e. a circle would come out as a triangle. We tried optimizing it more, but we just couldn't get the notetaking to an adequate state.

We were previously using Quartz 2D to handle the notetaking/drawing system, and now we are considering using OpenGL instead.  We've learned that OpenGL is used a lot for ios games, and we believe that it could potentially be faster and more efficient. Unfortunately, none of us have any prior experience with OpenGL and it appears to be a bit time consuming to actually learn it.

We had planned on spending the last two weeks giving OpenGL our best shot, but then we received some excellent news. The poster application we submitted for ACM ASSETS 2011 was accepted! We had to write a short 2 page paper about the project and they also sent back a lot of feedback on what we wrote.  That feedback, in combination with the experiences we had at Posters on the Hill and the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference will need to be taken into consideration when creating our new poster.

A couple of the things we learned from our previous poster presentations

• Text should be kept short! People do not want to come up to your poster and stand there for a few minutes reading. We received a couple of comments about our posters having too much text.

• Make text larger! Not excessively large, but it's a big poster and people will be standing a couple of feet away from it. Make sure it won't be difficult for people to read the text at that distance.

• We need to make it more clear that we are only working on the software aspect of this project. At the Richard Tapia conference people became very excited about the hardware and asked questions about that, and we had to explain that we did the iPad application portion of the project.
 

• People like diagrams. It can sometimes be easier and faster to convey something with pictures than with text.

This week we will be working on the new poster. Some of the material from the previous posters may be able to be rewritten and shortened so that it can be used on the new poster, but we also have to write about all of the work that we have done since the last conference.

Lindsey

Hard at work on the new note-taking system!

"Introducing the new Note-Taking Feature®. Innovation reinvented, all for the same incredible price."

You're welcome, Apple marketing team. I'll be expecting my job offer shortly.

We've been hard at work on incorporating the feedback from our latest set of usability tests into Access Lecture. We've already taken care of a surprising amount of our to-do list. However, there was one feature that all participants agreed needed a major overhaul: the note-taking feature.

What is the note-taking feature?
In addition to being able to follow along with lecture notes, our goal is to make Access Lecture capable of allowing students to take their own notes by writing directly onto the lecture.

The basic idea:
In using the new note-taking system, students will...

• Press a button to enter "note-taking mode".
• Use an iPad stylus to draw directly onto the real-time lecture stream.
• Save their notes directly onto the iPad as an image.

The issues:
During usability testing, the note-taking system took a snapshot of the currently-visible portion of the lecture. The application then transferred to a separate screen, where pen/eraser options were available. However, the snapshot did not allow the user to scroll or zoom. Additionally, the user's notes stayed on the image, regardless of where the user scrolled to in the lecture view, until the user saved and cleared.

The solution:
After a lot of brainstorming (see the image to your right), we came up with a solution that we hope will mitigate the issues experienced by testers.

Now, upon clicking the note-taking button, the following will happen:

• The user will not be taken out of the lecture view. This means that scrolling, zooming, and other features will still work as normal, and the lecture will continue being updated in real-time while the user is taking notes.
  
• The application's two toolbars will switch to two toolbars formerly present in the note-taking mode/view.
• To enable both writing and scrolling, the scroll gesture will require two fingers will note-taking is active.
  
• The user can write on the real-time lecture, now with no snapshot involved.
• Additional settings have been added, to adjust pen/eraser size.
  

We have this system nearly completed. The only issue we are facing is saving the user's notes, since it is no longer a snapshot of fixed size.

In conclusion:
We are extremely excited about the massive progress being made, largely with the help of our usability testers. Expect good news next week regarding the new note-taking system!

- Alex