This morning started off with a two hour long session focused on team building and collaboratively working with a group. I was pretty excited for this session because I love team building and bonding exercises, but the session ended up feeling very...unnecessary. It was just a very general talk about what it meant to work in a team and we did different brainstorming activities that I often felt were unhelpful since they were just forcing us to think about things we already knew. It was cool to get to spend more time with my team though.
After lunch we had a paratransit group meeting where we Skyped in Anat (she was home sick today). We talked generally again about our project and updated our goals to reflect everything that has happened and that we've learned since our meeting with Matthew on Friday. We decided to break the project up into two main objectives: working on the optimization for rerouting, and identifying and analyzing the ugly rides. After the meeting we tried to come up with a Google Doc that outlined all the will be entailed in these two projects, but we still have yet to say who is working on what. I feel like I could be a lot of help on both projects, but I like how much more structured the ugly ride project is, so I might try to work on that part if given the choice.
Our last thing on the agenda today was a very basic python intro tutorial session. It was really aimed at people who have just about no coding experience and no python experience whatsoever. I really don't have any formal experience using python; I've only modified scripts that I was given by other students on the same projects I've worked on. Therefore, I thought it could still be pretty helpful to me. Actually, I do think it was pretty helpful to get some slow and very basic intro into just the syntax for python and using ipython notebooks, since I've also never had the opportunity to use those before. However, at some point in the tutorial I started to feel that it was going a bit too slowly over concepts I was already intimately familiar with (for loops, if else statements, etc) and since the syntax was very similar to what I already know I started writing this post instead. :)
After lunch we had a paratransit group meeting where we Skyped in Anat (she was home sick today). We talked generally again about our project and updated our goals to reflect everything that has happened and that we've learned since our meeting with Matthew on Friday. We decided to break the project up into two main objectives: working on the optimization for rerouting, and identifying and analyzing the ugly rides. After the meeting we tried to come up with a Google Doc that outlined all the will be entailed in these two projects, but we still have yet to say who is working on what. I feel like I could be a lot of help on both projects, but I like how much more structured the ugly ride project is, so I might try to work on that part if given the choice.
Our last thing on the agenda today was a very basic python intro tutorial session. It was really aimed at people who have just about no coding experience and no python experience whatsoever. I really don't have any formal experience using python; I've only modified scripts that I was given by other students on the same projects I've worked on. Therefore, I thought it could still be pretty helpful to me. Actually, I do think it was pretty helpful to get some slow and very basic intro into just the syntax for python and using ipython notebooks, since I've also never had the opportunity to use those before. However, at some point in the tutorial I started to feel that it was going a bit too slowly over concepts I was already intimately familiar with (for loops, if else statements, etc) and since the syntax was very similar to what I already know I started writing this post instead. :)