Reflection — Week 2
As this studio course continues I find myself actually starting to enjoy practise of coding on Command Line with Atom. Having delved a bit into the whole chapter of loop statements (particularly- if, elif, then, for, etc). I could draw parallels between the work done in class with my prior understandings of HMTL, ASP, XML, CSS, etc. The basis upon which these statements run, so I’ve found, seem to run on a very similar basis as the coding languages mentioned, the minute difference being the command words (elif- in the case of command line whereas elseif, in HTML). Also, it was interesting to see that something that didn’t matter much in my previous coding practices actually made huge difference now using commandline like indentation, capitalization, etc.
In week 2, we were posed with a few codes and had to either point out a mistake or figure out the output. It was a bit nostalgic as I had seen very similar questions through my schooling. I feel that approaching code from so many different angles helps you grasp it wholesomely. Overall, I like the flow of the class in terms of coding and also find it easy to understand (or re-learn in my case) it as we started it from scratch.
Some very valuable lessons I would take back from this class would be user feedback, project proposition and practise. On displaying our first round of assignments at the mini exhibit “How Will They Speak”, fortunately we received some very valuable feedback. Putting your forth and gaining responses and reactions helps us take the next step in building it further. People who interacted with or took a look at our proposition gave us their own ideas or things that they would have liked to see happen along with our ideas. It is here that I also saw the importance of knowing how best to your ideas up for public scrutiny. Conveying ideas can often be very difficult as there are many limitations like time, medium, levels of fidelity, etc. But I have learned that many people imbibe information in many different ways. Some incline towards more auditory ways of capturing, they tended to concentrate and respond more during the conversations that we carried out. Some others took the time to read through the very detailed and lengthy brief that had written up, while most users who came up to our exhibit happened to show most interest during the video presentation and interaction with prototype.
Ultimately gaining a lot of information which in turn gave us direction as well as substance to work on, we now move on to integrating the two parts of this studio that I have mentioned so far- coding & prototyping to bring out a conversational tool for enhanced interaction in the space of Srishti N5 Campus.