Approaching the Final Push!

Post date: Oct 03, 2017 4:36:8 AM

Hello again,

It has been a really productive week since the last post, and we are starting to finalize our proposal. For the writing part, we took a step back to look at the project guideline and revised our introduction and background to improve the flow of the proposal. We also drafted a methodology chapter, identifying the detailed steps that we are going to take to complete our goals. Besides writing, we created an assertion-evidence slideshow and presented it in class. We learned about the importance of infographics and how to keep the slideshow simple while still conveying important points. After that, we drafted a final presentation slide as the base structure of our presentation next Monday. In class we also talked about ethics in social science research and the need for an IRB review. We started to contact the person in charge at WPI and inquired about the review process. In addition, we were able to reach Alessandra as one of our liaison and scheduled a phone call for next week.

As far as the content goes, we explored the different functionalities of QGIS and a phone app called Qfield. They are both softwares that can manage and display GIS graphical layers and create custom mapping of green spaces overlaying on top of a google map layer. After talking to a past IQP group who also did GIS, we learned about the Leaflet website where we can host our map data to make it public on our website. Meanwhile, all group members have been learning programing languages including HTML, CSS3, and JS. This knowledge will be great help for the implementation phase of our project.

Here is a prototype of our user interface

The basic idea of our app is to have multiple map layers representing different uses of green space. A checkbox will be shown on the side and each layer will only be displayed when the box is checked. On the map, right clicking with a cursor will enable a dropdown list that shows the type of the green space and its attributes. At this point we only created a base layer of green spaces based on the google satellite image, and we will be able to furnish the details once we get to Venice and use the Qfield app.

Now is the final push, two more weeks to go for A-term!

See you guys next time.

--Green Team