ICS 314 Spring 2021 Team Project

For the ICS 314 Spring 2021 team project, Christine Ramos, Yhanessa Sales, and I created the stUHdy-cubby app.

Premise

There is a notion that some students taking ICS courses may not learn course concepts well thereby dedicating more time than necessary on course work. A posit is that students study alone without taking advantage of the underutilized resource of students learning from their peers (see resource about peer learning).

Solution

The stUHdy-cubby app is designed to help students in ICS courses organize group sessions on any course topic they need assistance with. stUHdy-cybby GitHub Organization Page

Features

Contributions

I created the initial setup of the collections. Throughout the project minimal collections changes were needed. My main focus was to create and modify the add and register session pages. As the project developed, I assisted the other team members with any functional issues they had. I created the test cases for testcafe and deployed the app to Digital Ocean. stUHdy-cubby on Digital Ocean.

Takeaway

My main takeaway from this project was the hands-on experience with Issue driven project management (IDPM). If I just read the guidelines/best-practices, they would be meaningless to me. I found that I am a tactile learner and learn best by actually doing the concept…building the muscle memory. A few guidelines that resonated with me were the frequent meetings and usage of branches.

While the group only met formally twice a week, we openly communicated on Discord chats of any project updates or if another team member could assist with an issue. Each of the team members were very responsive which helped with a better project coordination.

The usage of branches allowed each of us to work independently to avoid overwriting each other’s changes. Additionally, the branches made it easy to share code if help was needed without emailing the code back and forth.

Resource

“What is Peer Learning and Why is it Important? by Rick Reis, Stanford