This semester is pretty unusual given the current circumstances. Coronavirus is an issue that is affecting people globally. In an effort to help people and hospitals a number of open source efforts have been made. In class this week we discussed just a few of these projects.

Additionally this week my group and I continued working on our contribution for Oppia. We got the approval from the Oppia team to start coding up our wireframes.

COVID-19 Open Source Efforts

Before we discussed all the different types of open source efforts regarding COVID-19, we had to do our own research and find one project. I found an open source application called CHIME. CHIME is used by hospitals to help with capacity planning. The way it works is you enter different variables relevant to your region and using a SIR model the application projects the number of new hospital admissions each day.

CHIME was originally created by and for Penn Medicine. With the Corona outbreak they have decided to open source it. This is part of a pattern for some of the other projects we discussed in class. Not only that but some of these projects also shifted towards helping the pandemic after the outbreak.

Some of the projects included hardware projects like ventilators or thermocyclers. One of the projects was PocketPCR, which is a thermocycler used for testing for any presence in air and surfaces. There were also a lot of other projects that were data visualizers. One of them included worldometer which displays the number of cases, the number of people who recovered, etc.

Group Project Updates

This week we finalized our wireframes for the Oppia Page we are building and they can be viewed here. After several edits and revisions regarding page organization, overall look and feel of the page, and content we got the approval from the Oppia team to start coding.

This weekend we have been reading through the contributing documentation and are setting up the development environment. On Tuesday we have a meeting with the Oppia team to go over the code architecture. I am looking forward to coding and getting the page up.