SeanMcb.com

Whew. I can’t believe it’s been a week since I last posted. Lots of things have been going on. By the end of this week, everything will be due, finished or not, so at least I can look forward to some free time again. Luckily, I don’t have many (only 1) written finals to take. However, I do have a major project due in all 4 of my courses. Here’s an outline of what I’m doing in each:

• Human Factors Interface Design - The entire semester has been one giant project in this course. My team of three took our initial design area (digital music players) and 1 ) interviewed users, 2 ) created personae, goals, and tasks, 3 ) explored initial design directions, 4 ) created paper prototypes, 5 ) took them back to the users, 6 ) revised our ideas and created an interactive prototype in Flash (and learned Flash along the way), 7 ) participated in a heuristic evaluation, 8 ) took the prototype back to users again, 9 ) and finally made more revisions. Along the way we’ve been giving presentations and creating a website to document our progress. Now, all that’s left is to make the last modifications to the final interactive prototype and do our final presentation to the class. You can try out our latest interactive prototype at the website if you’re curious about what we came up with.
• Discrete Mathematics - Final discrete projects are a “choose your own topic” affair. My group of 3 chose to explore the application of graph theory and string algorithms to the problem of analyzing common website usage patterns. We’re working on a Python prototype of our system which parses Apache logs and generates a report of the most common ways in which people navigate through your site. We think that navigational patterns will be more valuable than just straight pageview statistics for determining how to improve your navigation and tailor your content. We’re also doing a final oral presentation and writing a paper on our work.
• Computer Architecture - Final projects in comp arch are also “choose your own topic”. My group of 4 chose to investigate classic arcade hardware designs (e.g. PacMan), especially hardware sprites and the display portions. The project has changed a bit due to a lack of authoritative resources, but our current plan is to implement a hardware sprite module of our own design in Verilog and get it running as a demo on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Basically, we will hook our FPGA board up to a monitor and display a bunch of characters that move around the screen, some in response to button presses. We are also producing a website that covers our project and information about FPGAs, arcade hardware, and hardware sprites.
• Advanced Digital Photography - The final photography project is to produce a handmade book in an edition of two. I chose to make a book about the experience of going to Olin. The book features writings by other Olin students about their experiences. These writings inspired ideas for photographs, which I captured and placed next to the text. The whole thing had to be printed, stitched, glued, covered, etc. Bookbinding is actually a very complicated process, but it’s very rewarding once you have the final product in hand.

So, that’s basically my life until Friday. Either it all gets done or it doesn’t. In truth, I much prefer this situation to having four written finals. It may be more work, but I feel like I learn more, retain more of that knowledge, and come away with more to show for it. Copious projects are one of the things that makes Olin what it is.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.