Week 6 Post (6/24 - 6/30)

In the sixth week of my DREU Research Program, I once again dedicated the entire week to working on the autograder assigned to me last week. I struggled with writing the testers for the autograder due to the assignment’s open-ended nature, which did not provide a common ground for testing the code. After discussing my difficulties with my professor, we agreed to make a change to the assignment guidelines, which provided a foundation for building the autograder. I was able to create testers based on this change and spent the rest of the week debugging them.

I also spent some time contemplating potential research questions to analyze during the second phase of the research. Discussing these questions with the team now will help us better determine the type of data we need to collect when the course is launched. This has been an interesting aspect of my internship so far, as I have many questions I would like to explore. I am curious to see how we will narrow down these questions for the paper in the upcoming weeks.

We also went for lunch with Dr. Rodger off-campus, where we got to know more about each other. During the lunch, we learned about different types of computer science conferences held worldwide and discussed our research in more detail. Overall, the week had a rough start, but I enjoyed it as I made significant progress towards the end.