Please grab an index card and the academic honesty policy. (If you grabbed the academic honesty policy when you were in 321, you need not grab it now.)

Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Upcoming Work.
  • Extra Credit.
  • Questions.
• Course Preview.
  • Quick Course Overview.
  • The Projects.
  • Introductions.
• Strengths Finder
• Team Activities
  • Team building.
  • R&ecaute;umeé reviews.
• Course Preview Continues
  • More Syllabus Stuff.
  • Wrapup.

Preliminaries

Admin

• Welcome back to campus.
• New department academic honesty policy available at http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/academic-honesty-policy.

Upcoming Work

• Discuss your project with your team.
• Prepare questions for your community partners.

Good Things to Do

Academic

• CS Table Tuesdays! Upcoming topic: Facebook's Walled Indian Internet
• CS Extras Thursdays! Today's topic: Summer research. Next week's topic: \LaTeX.

Peer

• Women's BBall vs. Ripon Saturday at 3pm.

Questions

Quick Course Overview

• Building a medium/large project; continuous
• With a real client (but not mission critical)
• Mentored by an alumnus/a

The Projects

Current, past, and simulated students will come and talk about their projects.

• What is the project?
• Who is the client?
• In what stage is the project? (Just beginning, nearing completion, somewhere in between.)
• Why should someone want to work on this project?
• Questions from the class.

Board Bank

• Greater Powesheik Community Foundation works with multiple nonprofits that have governing boards. They need members for the boards.
• Current mechanism doesn't let people know about all the opportunities available and doesn't let boards know about possible members. Plus it's on paper.
• So we're building the matchmaker for people and boards.
• Client is GPCF; Nicole Brua-Behrens is an awesome person to work with.
• Should be ready to roll out this semester.
• It's meaningful and important.
• You get to read beautiful legacy code and see the project being rolled out.
• Current foci for the semester: Better filtering of search results; Make it look professional; Squash those buggies (and there are a lot)
• No continuing members. But we have four former contributors available for advice.

Grant Application Management Project (GAMP; it doesn't have charts)

• Building a Web application for GPCF to manage grant applications.
• Currently handled manually (email, Google docs, ad hoc solutions).
• The Web is a better solution; lets us manage applications more easily.
• Partner: Greater Powesheik Community Foundation; work with Nicole, who is really nice.
• Current state: Near completion. Functional aspects are there. It even looks better. But there's room for growth, particularly for administrative stuff. Usability studies may also be necessary.
  • Likely to be adapted to other purposes this semester.
• Similar reasons to work on this (yay legacy code), plus the chance to adapt code to a new purpose.
• It supports important things, such as educational opportunities and food banks.
• The commercial version that GPCF won't buy is $40K.
• No continuing members. But we have former contributors available for advice.

Community Resource Portal

• A new project from last semester.
• There is a huge PDF of community resources (housing, job search, expectant mothers). Goal of making the information available more easily, particularly if your primary internet access is through a mobile phone.
• Web site exists and scales for different device sizes.
• It's such an awesome project that AOAs choose to work on it in their spare time.
• Hope to put the resource in the hands of MICA soon so that it can be much more of a live document.
• Clever links to outside resources, such as Google docs.
• Close to MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
• Needs to move to Heroku and to the client.
• Needs to have better search, such as closeness search.
• Wants a calendar feature too.
• Agh! Creeping featurism.
• Every county has something like Mid-Iowa Community Action, so there's a good chance that this could be used statewide.
• Partner: Mid-Iowa Community Action.
• You don't have to worry about the design! But you do have to crush bugs and add features. Still a new project. And likely to have a huge impact. Also open ended; can grow indefinitely.
• WBC will be continuing on the project, and AOA is our mentor.

Text Message Notification System

• Partner(s): MICA and Project Head Start (pre-K)
• Need: An efficient way to notify parents of students of important issues (e.g., school closings) both as a group and individually.
• Text message notification system; assign students to classrooms, etc.
• Important privacy issues: Teachers should not see classrooms other than their own; Admins can only see certain classrooms.
• Close to MVP (minimum viable product). Needs some real testing and bug fixing this semester. Partners want to try it soon.
• New features: Partners also want scheduled notification and email notification.
• Why? Interesting to work with external things, like email and text messages. Security is a big challenge. Awesome group members.
• Two continuing members.
• Sending messages with a Gem.

Introductions

We will be working together for the semester. We should know a little bit about each other.

• What do you like to be called
• Preferred Gender Pronoun
• Where are you from?
• When you have spare time, how do you like to spend that spare time?
• What will you bring to the class?

Bring

• TD: UX/Front end
• NS: UX/Front end
• MH: UX/Front end
• EE: UX/Front end; knows Active Records
• RHB: Back end; Strategic
• SS: Likes to design things; Willing to work on anything; Proactive
• EM: Learns well
• WBC: Interpersonal skills
• LG: Depth of experience
• RG: Planning and Learning ; Willingness to do the grunt work
• KC: UX/Front end
• CMV: Organizational skills
• AOA: Lots of experience working on Web applications in multiple contexts.
• AS: Interpersonal skills
• DC: Organizational and interpersonal skills
• DW: Knows multiple programming languages; collaborates well; likes Data Science
• DM: Interpersonal workhorse
• DK: Math and an Analytical Mindset
• AD: Leadership; willing to Speak out; Web site design
• RJ: Detail orientation, good for tracking down and squashing bugs. Likes coding.
• AM: Hodgepode of technologies. Knows systems/servcie integration.
• AS: Has been through this before. Has learned from failure.
• B?: Strategizing and interpersonal.

Projects, Revisited

Once you have finished hearing about the projects, spend five minutes thinking about the projects and provide me with a ranked list.

• Board Bank (DC, MH, NS, AS, SS)
• Grant Application Management Program (BL, AS, EM, DK, RJ)
• Resource Portal (RG, DM, AD, TD, DW, BC)
• Text Notification System for Head Start (AM, CMV, KC, LG, EE, RHJB)

Strengths Finder

• Fortunately, somone else runs this section of today's class.

More Important Issues

You may think this course is about building software, but ...

• Working with people who aren't computer scientists
• Working in a team
• Testing, testing, testing

More Syllabus Stuff

• Expected workload.
  • 3 hours per week in class.
  • 3 hours per week outside of class.
  • Time for coding, reflect, meet with community partners.
• Grading
  • Rubrics for presentations (weekly).
  • Final portfolio.
• Schedule (and its structure).
  • This week: Setup
  • Next week: First meeting with community partners
  • Following week: Alumni mentors (minus one). Plan to be in class from noon until 5:30 p.m.
  • Two week sprints
    • Week one: Define tasks formally (using RSpec or Cucumber)
    • Week two (and parts of week one): Accomplish tasks, Demos in class
  • Wrapup and presentations
  • Turn in portfolio during finals week.

Team Building

• Introduce yourself quickly to your team members.
• Read each other's R&ecaute;umeé's. Discuss what they tell you about the other members of your team.

R&ecaute;umeé reviews

Reread the r&ecaute;umeés of the folks in your group, keeping the following questions in mind.

• What story does the r&ecaute;umeé tell? (If you had to summarize the person in two sentences based on this r&ecaute;umeé, what would you say?)
• What is something in this r&ecaute;umeé that you might adapt for your own r&ecaute;umeé?
• What makes this r&ecaute;umeé stand out from the others you read?
• What are two things you would improve in this r&ecaute;umeé?

I will wander through groups. I will also provide my own critiques in next week's class.

Wrapup

• Whatever is left