I am at the end of my time for the DREU. I am hopeful that I will get to continue working with this project throughout the fall, I have really enjoyed working with Professor Caspi and the rest of the lab.

Wow, the DREU sure is flying past me- it feels like just yesterday I was learning about and starting this project- and now I have an almost complete and functioning app!

This week, I continued with editing and reordering the content with the restrictions of the screens. My mentor found information from the AppInventor people about how others experiencing the 10 screen limit maneuvered around it. One of the ways that folks have done so is by using a vertical scroll layout module to organize content, which I have now incorporated into all of the new content.

This week was a journey! I was working on the app a bunch, but realized that there is a maximum number of screens that you can make for an app on AppInventor app- ten “screens” per app. This was kind of a hard realization to be confronted with, because I was using screens to organize the different chunks of the app. Therefore, I had to combine a bunch of screens so that I would have room to add more content to the app.

This week, I’m going to try a new format where I document what I did each day, to see if I can document more of what I’m up to on a day-to-day basis.

We had our first all lab meeting this week! It was so cool to get to meet everyone that is a part of the lab and hear about the work that everyone was doing. In all lab meeting we did introductions and product updates, followed by the start of our readings and discussions about articles. This where we also read and discussed an article about Antiblackness in AI,

This week I mainly worked on familiarizing myself with App Inventor’s interface, and learned how to do the backend for the app. I have a few screens of the app developed, and am going to add in some of the screens that a previous member of the lab created. When we met this week, we discussed which of the databases would be most appropriate for the project, and afterwards I rerouted the blocks of the app to utilize a cloud database that should fit our needs a little better! In addition, I am going to add a section on the app for users to add their own stories about the location that they are at, so that we can hopefully gain some more wholistic data about the areas that users will be surveying.

After getting my project proposal outlined, my mentor and I talked about next steps and the motivation behind this project! The app that I’m working on is ultimately going to have to be integrated with SciStarter’s interface so that we can utilize their wide base of folks interested in collecting data. This week I am looking into what exactly SciStarter will expect from our backend in order to integrate with their authentication for users. I also started working on the app through App Inventor and started thinking about how to ask the users questions about the intersection features (Accessible Pedestrian Signals, traffic speed/stress, and number of directions of traffic) so that they can provide meaningful information.

This week, I mainly worked on getting my project proposal up to speed! After a few initial meetings with my mentor, I have honed in on a project that will increase data collection for the OpenSidewalks project by partnering with a citizen science organization, through the creation of an android app for data collection! In addition to getting my project proposal solidified, I also was able to look at a past student’s app that worked on collecting curb ramp data, which I think will be useful as I look to develop a similar app for our topics of interest!