This week, I focused on researching various components for our proposal presentation. To better define our use case, I looked into a few different research papers with a similar end goal as us, and found good support that there is a need for our robot (because it can fulfill the psychological needs of students and will motivate learners and improve their learning output). I also properly scoped out the 6 main features for our robot including the 3 features for studying and the 3 features for interaction and what problems each feature can address with regards to our use case. I also worked on more concretely defining our technical challenges, and coming up with possible risk mitigation strategies by doing some simple research and seeing what options were available and more appropriate for our project. For example, when it came to the issue of having fast real-time communication between app and robot, there were a few options including using REST API with polling (too high latency) but I ultimately decided to implement WebSockets because it is a commonly used lightweight protocol that is suited to our project.
I have also started on creating the frontend pages for our WebApp using Django. I have not fully fleshed out all the pages (timer pages, studying session pages) and will work on that starting next week, but for now there is some basic navigation (login, logout, register, and a home page). I will further discuss with my team to fix on a design for the wireframes and then I will correspondingly update the frontend views for our WebApp.
According to the Gantt chart, I am on target.
In the next week, I’ll be working on:
- Design Presentation Slides
- Finalising our parts ordering list with my team
- Finishing up the WebApp frontend pages
- Starting work on timers, focus times, and todo list features on the WebApp