A step forward!

This week we actually got a step closer to implementing our idea about better interactions in the canteen. The idea of holding an exhibition to get other people to see and give us feedback was very insightful. We had set up a demo space with posters and a step by step documentation of how we reached our final idea. We also had our demo video on display.

Faculty and students from the Master’s program went through our demo and really appreciated our processes. It really helped us look at problem areas which we had not considered before. Some discussions went beyond the project and introduced us to various kinds of questions revolving around chatbots and how humans are interacting with them. Faculty gave us some critical feedback which we have documented and addressed in our Assignment 02.

We went ahead with coding on Python. We learnt how various loops and conditions work, and I could see how it would help us program our chatbot. It seemed a bit complicated, and as we had learnt these conditions in isolation, I knew we would face some problems in implementing them together to get the desired output for the last stages of this studio. But, it makes me really happy to see that we would be achieving a high fidelity prototype by the end of this studio.

There was a quiz in which we had to determine the output for the code displayed on the screen, which cleared a lot of doubts in our heads. We generally tend to write the code and see the output and accordingly change the code again. But here, guessing what the output would be taught us how exactly a piece of code will be implemented. I’ve also started to like the idea of coding and how it makes us think at every step of it. Every new challenge put in front of us gets me really excited.

We started working on our Assignment 02 by first listing out the flow of how the chatbot would respond to all the possible inputs. Initially, we achieved our desired outputs, but fitting more steps into a piece of code was something challenging. We worked on a linear flow of how it would respond to all the affirmative answers, and when we started on its alternate responses, we faced some problems. We’re still working on it step by step, and every little achievement makes us squeal in glee!