Group Project Presentation

This week we had the opportunity to hear about our classmates’ open source projects and their experience working with open source communities. I enjoyed learning about everyone’s progress and hearing about different ways they are contributing to the projects they have chosen. One thing that I found very interesting was that people were making various kinds of contributions, some people were working on fixing small issues while others were working on making one large contribution. It made me realize that there are various ways to contribute to an open source project.

From the presentations, I was also able to learn about the various open source projects that my classmates were contributing to. One of the projects that I found to be very interesting was p5.js. From the presentation, it seemed like there were many small contributions that we could all contribute to. I hope to contribute something to p5.js before the end of the semester.

Working with Oppia

Karishma, Selam, and I have been working on creating wireframes for the Oppia site that we hope to build. We have been receiving feedback on the wireframes we have made and have been trying to implement these changes. It has taken us longer than expected for us to finalize our wireframes.

Over the past week, we have been making many edits to our wireframes in order to reach a final product. I think one of the reasons it has taken us so long to complete our wireframes is that we were trying to create a website that we would like. We initially included many carousels and fancy visuals that we thought would be really cool. However, we should have focused on creating site that would be like Oppia’s other sites. Now that we have a better understanding of how we should be designing the site, I think we will quickly finish our wireframes.

So far, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Karishma and Selam. We tend to have two-three facetime calls a week to discuss our wireframes and plan out our meetings. I think we all work well together and good at communicating our ideas with one another. We also are able to joke around and have fun while completing our work.

Using and Contributing to Wikipedia

Until this weekend, I had not contributed to Wikipedia. I always thought that I would not have anything to add to the site or any of its articles. This weekend I looked at articles about places (such as the school I attended) that I was familiar with to see if there was anything I could contribute. I was able to add some resource links for both my old school and for the Forest Hills Stadium, a historic stadium in my town. I enjoyed contributing to Wikipedia and searching through all their archives.

In the past, I would always use Wikipedia to fact check, since it seems to always have all the information you would want to know. However, when it came to academics, I have never used Wikipedia since teachers have always said that it is an unreliable site. When I was in high school, my friends and I actually used Wikipedia to play a game. In this game, we would pick two unrelated topics such as Burger King and NYU. We would try to navigate to the NYU Wikipedia page starting from the Burger King page by only clicking on the linked pages. The goal of the game was to see who could go from one page to another the fastest just by clicking on the references found on the site. It’s a weird game, but it was always extremely entertaining.