Personal Goal
Posted on February 4, 2019
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If you were to ask me right now to do something I’ve never done before in front of an audience, I would laugh nervously and back away from you slowly, saying that I have an appointment I forgot about. Although maybe in not such a literal sense, I usually am wary of big projects that involve going completely out of my comfort zone. I tend to try to use at least some prior knowledge so that I’m not completely in the dark about what to do and how to do it.
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When Personal Project rolled around, I was slightly terrified. I knew I wanted to grow, but I was worried about putting myself too far outside my comfort zone. I began to brainstorm passions that I had to think of something I could do. The first thing I thought of was music but quickly decided against it, thinking that it wasn’t far enough outside of my comfort to really teach me things I didn’t know about myself. I was stumped for a while, and my dad suggested I do more research. However, he came into my room one day, finding me reading a book. He was confused as to why I clearly did not want to do Personal Project and suggested I do something I really enjoy. I told him that all I really wanted to do at that point was finish my chapter. He suggested I change my Personal Project to something to do with literature. When I thought about it, I couldn’t think of any project I would want to spend my time on. In this time, I finished my book and tried to use Goodreads to get another recommendation. I hadn’t used it much before because I didn’t enjoy the genre-based algorithm Goodreads is based on. Of course, at that point, my sleep-deprived, frustrated self did not remember that and was again reminded of how much I disliked book recommendation apps. At that moment, my foggy brain reminded me of something most superhero films and thriller novels will tell you: if you want something to be done, you have to do it yourself.
I decided that I wanted to code my own book recommendation app. This would take me a lot of time and energy, so I started doing some earnest research about how I could pull it off in the time that I had. Now that I what I had to do, I began working with a passion. I realized that in the time that I had, there was no way that I could actually create and publish something from scratch, that is to say, conventional programming languages. I knew a project like that would take me a year if not more, what with my lack of experience and knowledge. Let me elaborate on that for a second. Before this project, I knew nothing about coding. Absolutely NOTHING. That’s not great for me, because clearly, jumping into something headfirst is going to get you into a lot of problems. First, I had to figure out how I was going to accomplish my goal, plan my process, and then do it. By this time, the school year had started again. This did mean that I would have much less time for PP, but it also meant I had some sources of information readily available. I talked to Ms. Kim about my project, and she suggested I use MIT App Inventor, which was an app creator with a little extra freedom. It is based in Blockly, a form of code where you don’t have to write out the lines of code, rather, you use blocks conveying that code and input them wherever necessary.
This was more simple, but it was still too much for a newbie like me in the time frame. I decided that I would focus on some elements rather than others. I decided I needed a user interface, database, and algorithm. This, finally, fit inside the time limit.
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Now that I knew what I was going to do and how I was going to do it, I had to set myself some deadlines. I knew nothing about coding, so I allocated almost everything the same amount of time. This was a really bad idea, which I’ll explain later.
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I knew that I had to constantly check in with people to make sure that I was doing the right thing. I also had to design success criteria. My problem with that is that I had absolutely no idea what my product was even going to be at the end of this process. Due to this, I made very vague success criteria and relied on patches of ideas that I needed to sew together. After this, I didn’t have any idea what else I needed to make sure I did, so I began coding.
I am not exaggerating when I say this, but literally within half an hour, I got stuck. I researched, trial-and-errored, deleted and repeated. Over time, I developed a plan: the first time I would mess up, I would look closely at the code to look for immediate errors. If I couldn’t see any, I would go through using notifications or a certain text to see which steps worked and which steps didn’t. If this didn’t work, I tended to do some research and watch Youtube tutorials to see how others solved the problem. If this didn’t help me, I would look at the MIT site to make sure that the blocks that I was using were the right ones for the situation. Then, if I was still stumped, I would ask my father if he saw any obvious problems. Having experience in VBasic, a similar language, he knew what to look for. If worst came to worst, I would pay a visit to Ms. Kim. One example of this was when I wanted to store values in a database and didn’t know how to do that or which database I could use. I had started with TinyWebDB and quickly realized that it was useless for lists of values.
Google and my father couldn’t help very much, so I visited Ms. Kim. She suggested I use CloudDB, which was an experimental database set up by MIT. TinyWebDB and TinyDB are powered by Google, where the creator was before he moved his creation to MIT. She explained to me that it was risky to use either of those and that I should put my information into CloudDB. I also had to work around problems on my own. An instance of my problem-solving was when I needed to find and store ISBN numbers. During my Work in Progress presentation, Mr. Doug asked me how I would add enough books in my database for the average person to find the books that they needed. I had no answer for him and went straight to Ms. Kim. She, too, did not have an answer, however, my dad provided an idea. He suggested I go through the lists of components and find the closest one that I could. I found WebViewer, which is a component in which a certain website is visible. I asked if I could interact with the website, and the answer I received was no. I went through the blocks for the component and realized that I could interact with the URL. This led me to find a book search engine with the ISBN numbers in the URL, which I could isolate and store. I found one such engine, called ISBNSearch.org, which I then used. Over time, I coded a user login page, a user signup page, a way to pick books and save their ISBNs, a main menu and a few functions.
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Looking back at my journey, I am really proud of what I’ve done. I learned a great deal, more than I expected. I learned how to use MIT App Inventor and Blockly: how functions work, how to find the ones I need, and how to problem-solve with it. I also learned how to program: how to get from point A to point B, strategies to debug, etc. I improved on skills like perseverance and problem-solving in general, but the place where I learned the most was about myself and about learning. I learned how I have to push myself and I learned how I coped with failure and success. I learned how I learn when I’m set to learn by myself, which will be necessary when I leave school. Learning, for me, was pushed for by the teacher. They set lessons, they set deadlines, they judged progress. I had to do that all by myself in PP. When I did that myself, I gave myself a grade, then did everything in my power to improve that grade for myself. This taught me exactly how much I had been missing out on by not teaching myself how to learn earlier. Even if it seems obvious, you really have to learn how to teach yourself to learn to learn outside of school and have it mean the most.
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Here is the link for my project.
