Reflection 1

Reflection #1 — Murphy's Law Comes Into Play

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The Speed Read Proposal — Murphy's Law Comes Into Play

The beginning is always difficult. However, never have I come across such a difficult and almost cruel decision of what I should pursue. It's almost like the project is looking down on me, right above my head, and laughing with a weirdly dramatic countenance. It's strange, I've never been asked to think of something that interests me and go after it — Find something that I want to learn and make a project out of it, independently. I don't recall any prior experience with such a situation. Even if I have, in fact, done something of this sort, I definitely wouldn't actually finish the project all the way. Because of all of this, I knew I wanted to make an excellent project.

Initially, my plan was to simply make a Google Site that will allow the given user to read faster. Coming up with this project idea was quite the challenge. I tried to think about what struggle do I notice in my life. What needs to change? What can I do to help? After a while began to think about my academics, and that lead me to thinking about standardized testing. Now, what is the most stressful thing about standardized testing? The time limit, which is especially concerning during the reading section. I chose the topic of reading because, as I've come to realize, in my everyday life during school (Pre-Virus) I would notice kids that simply wouldn't read very quickly. When called upon to read aloud; when having a set amount of time to read a body of writing; when in a class that requires a major amount of reading, there are people who can't read nearly as fast as others. These classmates are falling behind others simply because they are loosing confidence in themselves and their academic level in comparison to others. I wanted to change this, to make a free, and straight to the point, website that would generate a certain number of words on the screen at a certain speed. Over consistent and persistent practicing, the website should help the user read faster. The website that will do this would be called Speed Read.

All of this is compelling enough, but how interested can you really be about reading quickly? So I thought to myself, what have you always been curious about — keep in mind this sort of freedom with my learning is completely new to me. I came up with two answers: coding and the App Store. Being able to code is a pathway to being able to do anything you want on the internet. As for the App Store, I've always been interested about making apps but I've never "had the time" to do it. Nothing was fully motivating me. This is also when I realized that my initial plan, to have a website that could help users read faster, would have to have some sort of coding component. This is when I integrated my first interest, coding, to the project. Secondly, I would also wanted to find away to incorporate the App Store with my project. I decided that instead of a website I would make an app. That is how I built off my initial plan to incorporate the topics I've always been interested in. In the end, I should end up with a properly functioning app that can flip between slides of words at selected speeds and selected quantities of words at a time — the number of words that show up on the user's screen at a time.

After all of the initial planning was done, I had to start researching how am I actually supposed to make an app. Because of my previous lack of experience with coding, I needed a simple way to make the app. A simple way to do things would be ideal. After a search of practically the whole web, I came across this video. It's explains to viewers in detail how to turn their Google Site into an app. Keep in mind, before I watched this video I was thinking that I'm going to have to build an app from scratch, I wasn't even thinking about the possibility that I could create a website on Google Sites and then transform it into an app. After watching this video I saw my first step towards starting this project; the video mentioned an application named Thunkable that would allow you to build your app easily and had a feature where you could transform your website into an app. I haven't previously heard about this app so I did a bit of researching about it. Being an insightful and strategic researcher is, in fact, one of my Learner Outcomes so I have to practice it as much as I can. From what I found out Thunkable seemed like a very easy way to create an app using coding blocks instead of actual code. This was intriguing to me because of my lack of experience with coding; I figured it would be a easy way for me to develop my skills. So that was it, I was going to build a Google Site then, using Thunkable, make the website an app.

Everything was going quite perfectly, but then Murphy's law got the best of me, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." I decided to try to test out the video I came across. I made a Thunkable account, and made a Google Site just to test out if I could make the website an app. Below is a screen recording replicating my train of thought and actions while trying to test out of I was actually able to turn the site into an app (The video is speed up for viewers' sake). But, if for some reason the video isn't working, here's a description of what I did: In the video that I watch I looked at what the person used to enter and view a website. I found out that the tool was called "Web Viewer". I dragged the web viewer tool onto the Thunkable screen where you create your app's design. Then, I quickly made a simple website that I would enter in Thunkable. I copied the link of the website, and then I entered it into where it said to paste the URL (the far right hand of the Thunkable screen). But, the website didn't work — It said that Google Sites refused to connect. So I researched the problem for a long time; I tried making the Google Site public, I tried entering the URL of Wikipedia just to make sure that the problem was with my site and not Thunkable (Wikipedia worked). I tired following several different tutorials on different methods to put the site into the app on Thunkable. I even got to this one video that I thought would help and be my solution just to find out that the person wasn't making what I wanted to make. I was definitely being a resilient and persistent achiever; however, nothing that I was researching was able to help me with the problem. This is where the adaptable achiever comes in. Because I want to improve my ability in being an insightful and strategic researcher, I need to display proof of my resilience, persistence and ability to be adaptable in these blogs. Below, under the first screen recording, is a screenshot and screen recording of my search history while trying to find out what was the issue with the web viewer tool in Thunkable.

I don't see the inability to create the app by making a Google Site and then putting it in Thunkable as a complete set back to my project because knowing that Google Sites wouldn't load or appear properly on Thunkable definitely saved me a whole lot of time of having to build a website just to not have it work or load when put on the app.

You maybe wonder what I did to overcome this issue. Well, to start off I knew that going the easy way of making Speed Read on a Google Site (and coding a bit of it on the side) would not work. If I wanted to go through with my plan and make an app, I would have to make the app on Thunkable. This would be harder than creating the design of the app on Google Sites because I am quite familiar with the layout on Google Sites while quite the opposite on Thunkable. However, on Thunkable I am able to easily code my project, because it has a coding blocks instead of me having to write lines of code with very little experience.

Lastly, I want to discuss how I plan to continue the Speed Read project. Since I know that I can't simply make a Google Site and put it on Thunkable to make an app, I'll need to build the app on Thunkable. So that's exactly what my next step is going to be — I'm going to create a new project on Thunkable, and start designing Speed Read's layout with the tools I learned from making the translator mini-project. This should take me a solid week and a half or two just because I am still very new to the Thunkable application. However, I know the really hard part will come into play once I start coding because I'll need to search up how to write the codes that I want. Although the blocks might make it a bit easier, I am fully aware that the coding of this project might take the most amount of time.