February 26-27

Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30

      During the end of the week, I finished connecting the html of the clubs page to the database, and got the table of clubs formatted. I ran into some issues on Thursday where no data would print from the database, but there were also no alerts as to why the code wasn't working. Even the alerts that I coded in weren't showing up. Eventually, though, my colleague figured out that nothing was printing because the program was trying to execute the code to print the table before the code that gathered the table from the database was finished running. So, I put the formatting code in a function and called that function at the end of the data-gathering code. By Friday, I had finished this code, though it still needs to be tested on a phone to see if the format is accurate. So, now the only thing left to do for the clubs page is find a way to parse the table that we scraped from the high school site into the different kinds of data they represent.
    My colleague and I also decided that we should have a section of the app that helps new students and parents navigate the school. In order to do this, we thought we could create a part of the app that would give people directions from one part of the school to another based on room number. We also plan to create a section that will allow students to enter a teacher's name and find out their room number. So, on Thursday, we started brainstorming the most effective way of implementing this idea. First, we had to decide how we would think of the map of the school on a code level. We created a couple of options: a grid of the school with a classroom, hallway, or intersection in each block, a network of hallways which would store the classrooms in that hallway and the hallways it intersected, or an array of classrooms that would each hold the hallway or hallways they were on. We started with the grid idea on Thursday, but by Friday, we had decided that the most efficient way to do what we wanted was to use the hallway setup. So, we had the hallways of the school being drawn to scale by the end of Friday. After that, my colleague started to assign room numbers to hallways and I started to fill a section of our database with the name and room number of all the teachers in the high school.
     I really think that the mapping system we are starting with the app will be a very useful and exciting tool available to new students. During the first week of school, new students are always wandering the halls with their heads bent over maps, trying to understand where they are supposed to go. With an interactive set of directions, new students will be able to find their way more easily and the situation of other students giving new students the wrong directions will be almost completely solved. Furthermore, if someone needs to get to the room of a teacher they've never had before, they will be able to find that teacher's room number and find where they need to go to get to that room.