On February 15th, 2024 we had our Night at the Museum and this is the blog post about how it went and what I saw

29 min read

Background

Our Night at the Museum was on February 15th, 2024, at 6:00pm-8:00pm. I had to take a 30 minute shift with the rest of my group and help explain our group project. We are in Period 3 with Mr. Mortensen so we had to come during 6:30pm-7:00pm. Our group didn’t qualify, but I still went and presented our project to a bunch of other people and asked them for feedback which was really useful and I got 15 responses, was hoping for more, but it is plenty to look at the data for. Our Project if 2 trimesters long and it is focused on taking student lessons, and making games to make them more fun and help students to retain the information more. Our first game was a binary one with a movable sprite. Our backend was where we had to store our data for everyone’s features and then we had to show it on our frontend, and in order to get the data from the backend, we had to use fetch commands to get the data to show and save our data used in each of the features. My team for this project was Vinay and Yuri as well as our crossover team: Parav, Shaurya, and Krishiv.

Presenting our Spring Site

Backend
We did not really present our backend site, the main purpose of the site was to have it run and use it as a place to store the data that the frontend needed to access. We created our APIs on it and used fetch and POST and GET methods in order to get it to show. In order to use the backend, we had to get off the School Wifi because it had the firewall which blocked AWS which was the host we used for the backend. We quickly went over this site if there were any people who wanted to know more about our project and how we did it, so we showed them our code in the backend and how we made our own API, and how we formatted the data using Blueprint.

Presenting our Fastpage Site

Frontend
This was the site we used mainly for our users to interact with. If you go to the website you can use our project and see what exactly what the users do. You can also go on the website to try it out. We got a lot of people to try out our features, and one person that I remember was an adult who came and asked us to explain our project as quick as possible. We all tried going over our features quickly, and when we were done he just asked us questions, and it seemed like he knew what he was talking about, so I assume he had a lot of experience. I had a lot of fun explaining our project to other people, especially adults because it was like showing them my capability.

Looking at other Projects

After 7:00, we could go, but I came early around 6:10 and looked at some projects from CSA and CSP. After 7:00, Shreyas and I went around and looked at the other classes that were displaying projects for the Night at the Museum. We first looked at other computer science projects and used them, but after that we went to other classes such as Ceramics, 3D Animation, Drawing and Painting, and AP Studio Art.

This was a really cool project made my one of my friends, Advik who is in APCSP right now. Basically, his group just recreated YouTube and it was really cool, it also had a very accurate view count based on how many different users clicked on that specific video. But I saw one flaw was that you could only upload mp4 videos, which is probably the best video format, but maybe they could use a url, but that would be tricky, cause there is no way to pull from youtube’s or google’s database.

Regarding AP Computer Science A, I looked at many projects even from both classes. I liked to see how all the students in AP Computer Science A and Principles were working as well as their thought process. I took a picture of Mati’s project which had a nice chatbot, seems like a very recurring them this year.

I walked around with Shreyas, Varalu, and Tanay, and we looked at different classes. I like to look at the art one because it is a very creative way to express your artisitc abilites. There were many good drawings and there were also a lot, I thought it was impressive how these other students were that talented.

Another really interesting we all saw was the room next ot drawing and painting. It showed a bunch of ceramics and Shreyas and I talked about how he wanted to take the class because he thought it looked fun. Seems like something he will consider in the future. There was a lot of ceramics that were done and they all looked really good and I was wondering how they did so many.

We also talked a little about photography and that was the class Shreyas took over Ceramics. It was cool, and while on that discussion, I wanted to see if I could get a really cool shot of all the ceramics. This is the shot that I tried to get, and it wasn’t super cool, but I think it is interesting, it is an ultrawide phot using the 0.5x lens, and it shows a lot of different and unique ceramics.

Going back to the Computer Science Projects, I found pretty cool during the new wave of computer science students at 7:30. This was pretty cool, and in this image, we see that a photo that has the project from Haoxuan and his group, and although it didn’t work there was a pretty good concept behind it and there was a good idea.

On my way out, I also saw a bunch of photos from the Digital Media class, and I saw a couple of my friends in it. One of them was from my friend’s Bhargav, and I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at, but I saw a recurring theme of the world, and it is pretty cool that they were able to do very good.

Here is one more photo of the Drawing and Paintings that I saw from that class and it was really cool that they did that. There were a lot of pictures and paintings that was pretty cool and there were a lot of pictures to see.

Questions

Here are my responses to the questions that were provided on the master schedule on the github issue.

Two Trimester focus planning

1) How you used N@tM to capture test data to be used in trimester 3? I think this was helpful because we learned a lot about this and it is very useful. I made a feedback form to learn what we did wrong and what we could do better before finally finishing our project. This was good because I got a lot of responses and feedback which can all be seen in later parts of this blog.

2) From feedback, something you will add to your project? After Night at the Museum, I think that the most useful feedback is to focus on more things for our project, don’t just get stuck working on the mario sprite. Continuously work as a team and implement our features and tackling different student lessons.

3) Other? I think other things that I could do for our project for the next trimester is take up Mr. Mortensen’s offer on joining CSSE 2, so that I can actually learn from all the people that coded all the different parts of the mario game and learn how to manipulate the sprite. That way I can contribute to game_levels_mp and our CSA 2 Trimester project

Blog / article on you and team

1) Reflection on glows/grows from your demo/presentations? I think that our team of 3 could use a lot of improvements in making sure that we work together and plan more efficiently, right now we don’t actually have a lot of features, but we could get specific people doing their speciality. Like I can work more on the frontend, while Vinay does a little of both frontend and backend, and Yuri can do a lot of Backend and work with some APIs.s

2) Visuals or pics of team and people you talked? Images are seen all throughout this blog

Blog on event

1) Something you saw in CompSci that impressed I really liked Adviks project, it was something very unique and advanced for a group of people coming from AP Computer Science Principles. It made me a little sad that these people had a way better project, because I am the one who is supposed to have something a little more professional because I am in CSA, but it is good that they are doing well in their class. I think this project was my favorite because it was original in terms of Del Norte Computer Science Classes.

2) Something you saw outside of CompSci that you liked? I really liked the music par that was performed by the band. This happened very early in Night at the Museum, around 6 o’ clock and it was pretty good that they were able to work towards this and perform a very good piece in front of all the attendees. I’ve always liked music, what if I combined computer science and music and made a project like an online piano using the assets that the CSSE people used for their sound effects. That would be a good feature to implement and learn a lot from.