Current progress
The good news is that I finally got access to the UT Github repository. The bad news is that I lost it about a week later, so we gave in and Thomas just cloned the repository so that I can work on the code separately. Thomas has continued working on the mobile version of the product, and he has gotten the navigation bar to display on the mobile application. The plan was for me to start working on implementing the design pieces into the website, but since the curriculum team has produced some rough drafts of modules, I actually wanted to ensure that our website could display everything they wanted in the modules before trying to make it beautiful, since it would probably be more complicated to add in more features later without breaking the design aspects.
What we have learned
Thomas has continued to learn about the differences between React and React Native, since he is adapting the website code into React for mobile. We’ve also been able to see firsthand some of the advantages and disadvantages of the different frameworks. While React Native would have theoretically allowed us to use the same code base across different platforms, in practice, it hasn’t really been worth it, and we also have not been able to find a good solution for embedding videos into our website using React Native, whereas it should be easy to do with React. I also finally started working on React Native. The curriculum team used a lot of bullet points in their module drafts, but React Native doesn’t have a built-in way to display bullet points, so I created a way to display a list of bullet points using the unicode bullet characters and some margin tweaking. The most difficult part was getting it to stay in-line and not extend past the edge of the website, but those were both fixed using the React Native’s FlexWrap. Also, they wanted to include quizzes, which would require the ability to input text into a box and generate a response when the text was submitted. Through that project, I learned about how React Native listens for and responds to user activity.
What we have planned
Now that we have all the functionality that the curriculum team has requested built for the website so far, I can finally start making the website beautiful! I’m planning to start by formatting the module pages themselves, since that’s what Terry is working on first. Thomas is going to keep building in the website functionality in the mobile application.