REFLECTION — WEEK 2
We started off with our projects where we had to make a video showing how the conversational agent would work. Getting all the faculty and the students to see our work I feel really helped us shape our idea. I believe that the feedback we got will be the catalyst to us producing a great final project. Some of the feedback includes having to work on our map aspect. A lot of people had doubts as to why we chose a video format and why not a map format. Also some of the students told us that we could look at how we can use this app after its purpose is served, while some others told us that its okay to stop using the app once the purpose has been served. This led us to really think about our next step. We think that the coding the conversation can really help us decide on the factors we should keep and the features we should add.
Last week, we covered the basics which was learning to program with terminal. Using terminal was a good experience because to me I did not know it was possible to do all these functions with it. I had an assumption about terminal that it was only used to find files because I had perviously used it for that function only. To be able to make use of it as a python shell was very interesting.
I wanted to know why terminal was important to learn, not just for the class, but what was the need to know terminal outside the class room. I did a lot of research and found out that terminal in Unix is a wonderful, powerful tool. I found out that terminal is capable of easily repeatable, it is easy to track because it keeps a record of your code, the interface is easy to use and produces an input and output through single line commands. This became clear to me the minute we started to code on python.
The python language is relatively easy for me because of my existing knowledge in programming. However there are a lot of shortcomings to learning a new language. The python language is almost like talking to the computer where the syntax is really simple. This was hard for me to catch up on because the syntax was so different. Since python did not require semi colons at the end, I had to keep reminding myself that I was programming on python. Also the fact that the brackets were not needed made me a little confused because to me it was the only thing that would help me keep track of my code and the loops. I also wanted to know why the python language was designed to be this easy. So like I did before, I did my research and found a post on this topic on Medium.
I read about how python language is easy to learn, interactive, object oriented, portable and extensible and also improves user productivity. Using the terminal to code was a little frustrating because it was one line code, but once we started to code on atom, which is an editor, it started to become fun. Using atom made it easier because it colour coded everything and it was really easy to visually see what the keywords, the functions, string, etc were and were easily differentiable.
Using atom to code and the forming the output on the terminal was good because it gave you the error on the terminal which you could find easily and correct on atom. We also have to make use of this and use it for out conversational agent. This became easy with the loops that we had learnt because loops help give multiple conditions which can be satisfied and hence produce such an output thus making it apt for conversational agents.
Out next step is to learn more functions and more ways of application of loops and come up with a really good conversation agent for our project. I am looking forward to learning more code and implement it in our project.
Here are the sites that I referred to:
