Research Project at Ga Tech

While here at Ga Tech for the summer intern program, I will be wroking with Colin Potts and Reginald Hobbs. Colin Potts ia a associate professor in the College of Computing here at Ga Tech. He works in the field of Software Engineering and his research interest include the definition and design of interactive systems. For a better list of his research and classes he teaches at Ga Tech visit his personal page.

Reginald Hobbs (Reggie) is a PhD student at Ga Tech and hi faculty advisor is Colin Potts. Reggie also works in the field of Software Engineering. For a list of his research please visit his personal page.

Project:

Colin is now working with schematic scenarios to understand users needs. Scenarios are narrative descriptions of interactions between users and proposed systems. These scenarios help both user and designer in the understanding of the functionality of the system being looked at. For the project, Colin would like to take the narrative description and find a way to present it on a web site. At this time, scenarios on a web site are on a document that you scroll through on one page. To see a example click here. But we would like to design a site were a scenario can be represented in a way that could be understund by all that look at it. So I am working on a way to present the information on a web site. Once I have finished, I will then work to try and write a program that will translate from SCML to HTML.

Progress Report:

WEEK 1 & 2: (June 16-28)

During our first two weeks here, we all sat as a group and listened to presentations by various people on campus. The presentations were on different projects that advisors or grad students had for us to work on for the program. The presentations we re done to help us decide on a project that interested us. So after the first two weeks we picked a project and then started to work with our mentors on our project.

WEEK 3: (June 29-July5)

Colin and Reggie both were out of town this week. This gave me time to read some articles about scenarios that Colin gave me. The first article, "Using Schematic Scenarios to Understand User Needs" by Colin Potts. In the reading he talks about what a scenario is, why it is used, and how it is set up. The other was "Inquiry-Based Requirements Analysis" by Colin Potts, Kenji Takahashi, and Annie Anton. Again this article explained some of the requirements needed by the designer and then how that information is used to create the scenario.

WEEK 4: (July 6-12)

This week I looked at ways to present the information for the scenarios on a web site. I then sat down and wrote out some ideas for what I could do. Colin has given me some books on HTML and Java, I will now sit down with these books and see if some of the ideas I have can be done on a web site. This week we also decided that we will meet twice a week to see how things are go with the project. And if I have questions I am to ask Colin or Reggie or email them.

WEEK 5: (July 13-19)

After reading some of the books that Colin gave me I have come up with a two examples to show Colin. I was not sure what he wanted exactly so I just try a few ways. So the following are the two examples I have come up with:

  • Example 1
  • Example 2

    • To do this two examples was not very hard but since this was my first time using frames it took a little time to get it to work the way I wanted it. Along with using the targets to make the main frame go to the section that you want from the index fra me. But overall to us frames is not a hard process at all.

    This week I also took a Advanced Web Design Class with the Continuing Education Department here at Ga Tech. The class was a two day class on how to better a web site and other issues dealing with site. (i.e.: security, Java Script, fonts, and etc..)

    WEEK 6: (July 20-26)

    This weeks task was to finish one other way to represent a scenario on a web page. That example can be seen by clicking here. Now that we have a few ways that they can be shown on the web we would like to try and write a program that will translate from SCML to HTML. So Colin has given me other book to read called sed & awk by Dale Dougherty. I will be using awk to try and write the program to do the translations. These to languages are both used on Unix and I will have to read and try examples so learn how the language works.

    WEEK 7: (July 27-August 2)

    Part of last week and then this week has been given to reading the book Colin gave me. I have read some of the book and I am trying the languages sed & awk. I have been using test files of regular text format to see if I could get sed or awk to work. I have been doing a very good job of understanding both of these languages so the testing is going well. I am now starting to see if I can get a small program to work on translating SCML to HTML. Next week I hope to have good news to tell you like it works.

    WEEK 8: (August 3-9)

    This was the final week to work on my project. The last thing I had planned on was writing the program to do the translation from SCML to HTML. Here is the Sed script that does it.I said last week it would me nice to be able to say it works while

    IT WORKS!!!!

    So now I am working on my presentation and final report.

    WEEK 9: (August 10-14)

    This is the last week of the intern program.

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    Last Modified: 9 August 98 by Stephanie Akers(sra0859@cc.gatech.edu)