Hello, lovely reader! What a week it’s been. We at STEM Visuals got to have our first proper presentation to a more public audience (other groups, educators, and visitors to Lehigh), we’ve got our module to a functional prototype stage, and it really feels like a culmination of everything we’ve done thus far. Allow me to talk a bit more in-depth about each of these things!

First, the presentation–or more accurately, a ‘press conference’. Mountaintop staff gave us all the opportunity to share our projects with the larger Lehigh community, and I was in charge of putting together the presentation content. I’m quite proud of the results, actually–feel free to view the finished product here.

These sorts of presentations seem simple but often force me to do some of the most critical problem-solving surrounding our project. Coding often is about getting knee-deep into documentation, hyperfocused on solving a very specific problem. This sort of work, on the other hand, forces me to confront more existential questions about our project–who are we catering to? Why do they care about our project? How are we stacking up with others doing similar work?

It may seem somewhat pedantic, but having these answers in the back of my mind really helps to ground our development in realistic expectations. Knowing our project, our audience, and our goals for the future allows every smaller decision to be made in pursuit of these larger goals. Not to mention, it’s just pleasant to take a break from Python. Highly recommend taking on a variety of tasks like this in the future, as having the ability to stay productive while challenging different parts of your brain can provide much-needed stimulation (or a break to the parts of your brain most prone to burnout..)

Now, this isn’t to say I spent a whole week on a presentation. We’ve also been continuing to synthesize the basis of Tyreese’s Bokeh code with my neural network library, to great success! Just yesterday, we even got to test putting our Bokeh module into the greater HTML package–and I couldn’t be more ecstatic with the results. Getting to see our work in the same format as the finished products before us was so, so exhilarating. We hope to clean up some final bugs and push this test build onto the public web by the end of next week.. but for now, enjoy a small sneak-peak!

From here, I think our work will begin to shift away from the massively technical to make a more complete, feature-rich product. We’ve been taking a strong look at accessibility features, with plans to implement screen-reader functions, colorblind-friendly site palettes, and audio/video transcription. After all, what good is an educational product if some students just can’t use it?

Overall, I feel pretty darn good about our current progress. We’re on track to finish this module by the end of August, which was our original timeline! I can’t wait to see how things unfold, and I’ll keep you updated weekly!

-Maddie