It’s been a few weeks since our intro, which means it’s time for the next post in the Botanical Bytes blog. This week I would like to talk a bit about how the project is coming along, our ups and downs, and – of course – how this all ties in with biology.
At this point in the first term of our capstone, the A-Life Challenge team is elbow deep in the technical design of our simulation software system. I feel really lucky to have such intelligent team members with me in all of this. These folks had some incredible ideas in the beginning which we have managed to develop into actual, functional areas of our software in the past few weeks. Overall, the design process is going really well.
I was a bit daunted at first when it came time to start designing the project. Our team had talked about some really neat potential features – but now it was time to actually figure out how to build them. That was a whole can of worms I wasn’t sure I was ready to dive into. But, the Capstone program seems to be designed with nervous wrecks like me in mind. The professor, our mentor, met with us to help us narrow down realistic goals and there were multiple, step-wise assignments designed to focus our efforts on the different aspects of this preliminary process. We wrote our Technical Requirements Document to nail down the ‘what’ part – what we wanted to build, what we wanted it to do, what it should look like, and what we shouldn’t be worried about. Then, we moved onto the ‘how’ and ‘why’ parts with the Design Document. This was our chance to explain not only how we intended to build what we wanted to build, but why we wanted it that way. To be completely honest, I was a little frustrated seeing the assignment details forcing me to do all this extra work, explaining my reasoning when I could just be jotting down the resulting design decisions. But, as I learned while writing the Design Document, explaining our reasoning actually forced us to take a look at whether a particular design choice was a well-founded decision, or if it was something that didn’t really have a solid purpose.
We did a lot of work over the last few weeks to flesh out the major structure of our project, but I feel like we also got the chance to plan ahead to make sure the overall goal of the project was being met: Develop an educational tool that teaches students about evolution. We stopped often to confirm that our design choices would not take us too far away from biological reality, and we had some pretty tough calls to make when it came to compromising between total scientific accuracy and ‘completing a project on a tight schedule’. Again, in these moments I found myself full of gratitude for the teammates I’m working with, because it seems like we’re able to find solutions to these issues pretty quickly and can move on without getting stuck.
I like to think we’ve struck a nice balance between what’s accurate and what’s feasible. We are basing all of our simulation mechanics and interactions on real ecological math where possible, and using pared-down equations for other items to help with the overall memory and computing load. Not to wax poetic on you guys, but I really appreciate how this process of finding a compromise between perfect accuracy and performance so closely mirrors the processes found in biology. Every living organism on the planet is the result of innumerable compromises just like that – organisms have to conduct some profoundly complicated activities where accuracy is of utmost importance, yet they’ve got to do this in an efficient, energy conserving manner. I hope that our team can continue to find that balance throughout the development process, as we’ve done this last few weeks.
Looking ahead, the A-Life Challenge team will be developing our very first collaborative repository for this project, and then later in the term should be finishing up our first working prototype of the software. We’re going to be finalizing our Design Document soon, and by the end of this term we will hopefully be ready to start real development! Stay tuned for more Tales of Interest from our little corner of the software development world.
Thanks for reading!
With love,
Your friendly neighborhood Plant Lady
Leave a Reply