Week 4
In the fourth week of my research our group met with Professor Mark Guzdial again to talk about the pedagogy begind computer science classes. This meeting was very inshightful and told us a lot about things we never even concidered about teaching a class to first years. We mainly discussed what it was exactly that we wanted to teach the students and what the ultimate goal of the course would be. We thought about the different objectives for the ocurse. One of the biggest (and possibly end goal) of the course would be for students to understand and implement the A-Star algorithm. We also talked about ways to keep the students interested in the course and we talked about the importance of engaging activities and projects to keep the first years learning new things while also emjoying the class and having hands-on interaction with robots. During the Meeting Professor Guzdial also had some questions about my code diary. He wanted me to clarify certain points I wrote down in order for him to better understand exactly what the difficulties were so that we can later on fix or alter those things for the first years.
Another thing I worked on this week was creating a websocket for the simulation we were creating. Another girl from my research group and I were put in charge of creating this websocket. I did the frontend code and she did the backend. To connect the frontend and the backend code we needed this websocket. We talked to one of our research group members who had just done something similar and could help us in the right direction. After this conversation we both went on to do our own research for the websocket and started coding. We were able to set up a simple connection pretty fast and after that moved on to put more functions on our websocket. Our next goal was to have a simulated robot move around in the canvas based on keyboard commands given from the backend. After looking up a lot of information on both ends and also getting some debugging help from our fellow software group members we had our first simple simulation of a robot moving around! It was super exciting so see your code come to life like this and see something you created move when you tell it to.