As the spring 2021 semester comes to a close, I find myself writing this reflection regarding the experiences in my ICS 414 course. These past few months I have had the privilege of working in a team with seven of my peers on a semester-long project focused on our community. More specifically the goal of our project was to produce a website to raise the community’s awareness of their greenhouse gas emissions and potential options to reduce them. Furthermore, the project idea was suggested by a Hawaiian Electric Industry representative who partnered with our professor to help simulate a software business environment. By the end of the semester, we participated in six milestone meetings with the representative to display our progress and receive any feedback to implement into our project before the next deadline.
As the course began our professor split us up into four groups with about eight students per group. My team’s GitHub name was Environmental Impact and we generally met twice a week apart from our in-class meetings, and truthfully I took less of a proactive and more of a support role throughout this project. I was a part of another semester-long group project for a separate ICS course so I appreciated my team for providing structured expectations as the semester progressed. That being said, my largest contributions to this project were to the Quick Access and What-If pages. The former was my original idea while the latter was a part of the suggested feedback we had received.
As stated, the Quick Access page was a portion of the project I initially worked on. But as the semester progressed I realized that while an interesting feature it was less important to the grand scale of things. My original reasoning for the Quick Access page was to offer community members a chance to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions to potentially motivate them to make an account on our website. I like to believe that there are two types of people, one that is concerned about their impact on the environment who will appreciate and utilize our website and the other who has yet to realize just how impactful they can be. But as time went by I felt I was investing too much of my time on the Quick Access page for its simplicity and actual utilization from our users, in hindsight no user would need to use this page after signing in and so I transitioned into assisting another team member with the What-If page instead.
The What-If page was originally going to be developed by another member named Justin, but I was added to assist him shortly after he began working on it. The idea for the What-If page was to offer users the ability to observe how simple changes to their daily travel routines could affect their greenhouse gas emissions with the graphs as visual aides to represent them. Justin and I split the page in half and he took the top calendar portion while I took the bottom graphical portion. The graphical portion was originally based on the dashboard’s graphs and I added all of the differences to them, the second set of data, in-page changes, and the card values. Admittedly the card values weren’t completed as in the last representative meeting they didn’t function as expected.
In the end, I can say I appreciated the structure and pacing of this course. I would be lying if I claimed I didn’t make any mistakes during this semester. Nonetheless, the What-If page that Justin and I implemented was later recreated by other groups who tried to add them at the last minute, and even imitations of my Quick Access page were duplicated to a lesser extent. The size of the teams was also double the normal size for most group projects I’ve worked on in the ICS department that far. I found this experience very valuable as we hadn’t been introduced to groups of that size yet. I feel the thing that will leave the greatest impression during this course was the ability to actually work with an HEI representative who simulated a coding project. I found this experience indispensable as it helped me realize what a client interaction may look like when presenting my work. Genuinely it gave me a sense of affirmation that what my professors were teaching me would be used outside of just schooling.
I would like to offer my special thanks to my professors and the HEI representative who worked with us this semester. If you are reading this, Professor Moore and Professor Johnson, thank you for providing this course. And to the HEI representative, I can not thank you enough for offering us this opportunity to work with you. Thank you.