Over the summer of 2020 I took part in a software development research internship through the Radgrad project and funded by the National Science Foundation. Along with 3 other UH ICS students, the four of us spent the summer planning and prototyping CSExplore, which is a mobile application which aims to engage Hawaii high school students in Computer Science through local opportunities and educational games and modules. The summer culminated in the SURE symposium where we hosted the project in a poster session and answered questions about our project.
This internship taught me a lot about the software development process and given that it was all remote, it taught a lot about communicating and working with others remotely. I think I had a little bit of naivety going into the project and assuming that we would have a deployable app by the end of the summer. Because of this I was somewhat gung-ho and it was a good learning experience for me to have to slow down, and spend practically the entire first month just scoping out resources, what frameworks we wanted to use and making simple wireframes. The weekly meetings became a kind of melting pot of ideas where some ended up never coming to fruition and some ended up being taken on by other members.
By the end of summer we have created two prototypes, one being a more whimsical approach and one being a more professional approach(which I worked on). This split happened somewhat naturally as all four of us built individual prototypes and two leaned one way and two leaned the other way. We went through many iterations of different prototypes before we landed on these two. The professional approach that I worked on features a sleeker ui, learning modules and tools for community involvement(clubs, events, projects). I am disappointed I did not have time to finish the app completely but I am hopeful for whoever picks it up to keep working on it.