Current progress
This week, Thomas and I both made progress in our respective sections of the project. Thomas is working more on the front end, while I am working on the back end. Thomas was able to create a working prototype of some basic functionality we want for our website, such as displaying the different sections of the website at the top of the screen, the ability to click on different tabs at the top of the page to navigate to different areas of the website, and displaying text in the different pages. I decided on the final layout of how our educational modules will be stored in our database and coded it in, so it is now ready to store those data.
What we have learned
We have both learned a lot in our own sections of the project. Thomas has learned about the basics of React for websites in terms of setup, navigation, and displays. I’ve also learned a ton about how to use databases and how to create schemata that suit the data to be stored in the database. The factors that I’ve had to consider in building the back end include the time it takes to access the data, the space it takes to access the data, the ease of searching through the data, the ability to change the layout to include more data types, and the ease of teaching others to use the database. Considering all of those factors, I’ve decided on a layout that uses only two tables – one that contains all the modules and one that contains all the data to be represented by those modules. This will be the easiest format to access from the front end without restricting the types of data we might want to store in them in the future.
What we have planned
For the next two weeks, Thomas and I will continue working in the areas we’ve divided into. Thomas is planning to continue building out the front end by adding more functionality and begin work on the code that will connect our two pieces of the project. I’ll continue working on the back end by generating a list of commands that the front end can use to interact with the back end, implementing a way to search the database, and design and code the table that will hold our website and app’s glossary.