Community Meeting (August 15, 2018): Presentation on GSoC 2018 Projects

Description

Presenters: 

• Victor Alagwu: Upgrading AChecker
• Kunal Mohta: Build a service for adaptive content and learning supports
• Jeevan Prakash: Import external data to MyL3
• Ria Bhatia: Inclusively design and build a game for kids
• Christine Hu: Playtown!: Creativity through exploration

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.

Video Recording

Notes

Upgrading AChecker

https://gist.github.com/VictorAlagwu/f7c36cc27846bc302ce4e96a394b7a90

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lMMqdA18bHO9RHCdljwj5Kdad77lk94W0CFkMn-kEyk/edit#slide=id.p

• Upgraded AChecker so that is will be compatible with PHP 7.0+ and MySQL 4.1.13+
  • upgraded MySQL queries to MySQLi
  • several other changes were required
  • updated AChecker to version 1.5

Build a service for adaptive content and learning supports

• Meant to be an easy to use REST API for services like dictionary look-up, translation, spell-check and etc
• main aim was to have a well documented, refactored, easy to understand and test covered api 
• Tasks achieved this year 
  • Services
    • Dictionary service
      • Used Wikitionary and Oxford
    • NLP (Natural language processing)
      • currently only adding meaningful tags to the text  (e.g grammatical constructs)
      • Used Compromise
    • Translation
      • Used Yandex, Google
  • Testing
    • unit tests
    • integration tests
      • test overall API responses
      • used nock to mock servers
    • contract tests
      • to test response structure from third part services
      • used AJV to test JSON schemas
  • Documentation
    • Swagger
    • GitHub repo README
• Remaining work
  • convert existing functions to Kettle Middleware
  • Implement HATEOS for all endpoints
  • Optimize the application
    • reduce number of request by caching data on the server

Import external data to MyL3

• My life long learning lab
  • Data sources
    • import weather data
    • import map and location
    • import Google fit data
    • import Facebook status
  • Importing data
    • can select which type of data you'd like to import
      • for example from weather can choose the temperature 
    • location
      • will reverse geocode the location to transform the longitude and latitude into an address
    • Google fit
  • quick notes
    • track your data (enter data
  • playground
    • reflect on your data

Inclusively design and build a game for kids

https://medium.com/@riabhatia_73052/gsoc-2018-spifind-music-mania-3e9cc7ec8d5e

• Worked on two games 
  • eye gaze
    • control using eye gaze, instead of using a mouse for example.
    • on problem with these games is that most are very simple, don't involve enough exploration and discovery
    • Game SPIFIND
      • would use eye gaze (can optionally use the mouse) to find spiders. 
        • the room is blacked out, but where the gaze is there is a spotlight
      • includes gifs as well as text to explain how to play the game
      • other than being fun, it will help the children build up their eye muscles 
      • received positive feedback from children playing the game
  • digital literacy for visually impaired children (1 - 2 years old)
    
    • Music Mania
      • https://build-odeglceahu.now.sh/
      • in this game you can press any key and it will produce a musical sound
      • fun to play music for keys
      • will help the children learn the various key and their locations

Playtown!: Creativity through exploration

• switched optimized game