Update _config.yml

.vscode/settings.json

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+{
+    "githubPullRequests.ignoredPullRequestBranches": [
+        "master"
+    ]
+}

_config.yml

@@ -3,13 +3,13 @@
 #
 
 # Name of your site (displayed in the header)
-name: Your Name
+name: Bess Hagan
 
 # Short bio or description (displayed in the header)
-description: Summer 2020 DREU Project
+description: Summer 2024 DREU Project
 
 # URL of your avatar or profile pic (you could use your GitHub profile pic)
-avatar: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/barryclark/jekyll-now/master/images/jekyll-logo.png
+avatar: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/142757968?v=4
 
 #
 # Flags below are optional
@@ -18,14 +18,14 @@ avatar: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/barryclark/jekyll-now/master/images/je
 # Includes an icon in the footer for each username you enter
 footer-links:
   dribbble:
-  email: yourmail@mail.com
+  email: haganb@southwestern.com
   facebook:
   flickr:
   rss: # just type anything here for a working RSS icon
 
 # Your website URL (e.g. http://ajstent.github.io)
 # Used for Sitemap.xml and your RSS feed
-url:
+url: https://github.com/besshagan
 
 # If you're hosting your site at a Project repository on GitHub pages
 # (http://yourusername.github.io/repository-name)

_posts/2024-05-12-earlyMay.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Early May
+---
+
+Before beginning the program, [Luc Paquette](https://education.illinois.edu/profile/luc-paquette) introduced me to [Colleen Lewis](https://cs.illinois.edu/about/people/faculty/colleenl) over email because she was coordinating with the university to provide housing for me over the summer at Presby Hall.
+
+![Presby Hall](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/besshagan/besshagan.github.io/1fa05571db7288e1bec0f1662aedd5f5b6a1dd41/images/entrance.jpg)
+
+I'll be here at Presby by myself for the first two weeks, but I'll be sharing this 4-bedroom suite with other students soon. Everyone I've met so far has been incredibly friendly and welcoming. In fact, Luc and his wife picked me up from the airport to take me to Presby, and the UIUC students who staff the front desk here have helped get me set up, and they've given me lots of information about the area I'm living in. Presby is within walking distance from Green Street, where there are restaurants and businesses, including a small Target that sells groceries and other (dorm living) necessities. My first day of the DREU program begins tomorrow. I'm meeting with Luc at his office at 9:30 am, and I'm excited to get started!

_posts/2024-05-12-week1.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 1
+---
+
+## May 13 - May 17
+
+I met Juan Pinto, a PhD student at UIUC, during my initial meeting with Luc. We discussed the overall project, what the next steps in the process should be, and we made plans to meet again Wednesday afternoon after I had some time to review the mock data I helped to generate on May 9th. Luc also invited me to join the INVITE Institute's Slack Channel where I could ask questions and attend meetings with other people on this project.
+
+Over the next few days, I was also given read-only access to the database via HeidiSQL and Admin/Developer privileges on the Minecraft server where the learning environment was built. I attended INVITE's strand1 meeting on Slack, and I met with Jeff Ginger virtually to talk about the data and the learning environment. He walked me through installing MultiMC to navigate the WHIMC/Minecraft server that data is being collected from. On Wednesday, I met with Luc to go over my initial notes on the data, and we agreed on a regular day/time to meet once a week. Luc also wanted me to meet with Juan weekly to discuss the project and receive help.
+
+I spent most of Thursday and Friday acquainting myself with the learning environment. I have never played a videogame on a PC before, so learning how to navigate basic controls while I taught myself how to use the development tools I was given was challenging, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. The plan is to generate mock data for myself that I can look at to see if I can gain further incite into how to recognize points of challenge and persistence for student participants.
+
+Lastly, I reached out to DREU about the DREU Student Kick-Off Webinar because the dates on the Summer Activities Calendar did not align with this year's calendar, and the link for this event was broken. I haven't heard back yet, but I hope to receive more information from DREU about the events I am meant to attend soon.

_posts/2024-05-19-week2.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 2
+---
+
+## May 20 - May 24
+
+Colleen Lewis reached out to me over the weekend to invite me to join a computer science research and reading group at UIUC. These groups meet on Tuesdays and Fridays, and I attended meetings for both groups this week in addition to my second strand1 meeting, the monthly meeting for the entire INVITE Institute, and a meeting with the WHIMC Barrelbot team. Midweek, I received an email invitation to attend the CS 2024 Summer Research Lunch & Learns. This speaker series will be held on Tuesdays at noon beginning next week.
+
+On Monday, I had my weekly check-in with Luc. He asked me to choose one or two of the questions he had about the database to see if I could extract that data. So, I started the week learning how to export and query from the database using HeidiSQL to find out how many times a player attempted a puzzle before reaching a solution. I tried a few different mySQL queries which may or may not be correct, but I won't be able to truly test these queries until some of the issues I encountered with data collection are corrected.
+
+So, I reached out to Luc and Juan to ask how I should proceed. Luc said I should try working outside of the database by either using Excel to prototype the data or by using Python to analyze the data. I decided to attempt the latter after my first weekly meeting with Juan. He shared some information with me about how to use Python and Pandas to extract and analyze the data. I spent Thursday and Friday teaching myself how to use these tools, and I began writing my own code to extract data from the mySQL database remotely.

_posts/2024-05-26-week3.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 3
+---
+## May 27 - May 31
+
+I'm still learning how to utilize the Pandas library in Python to do data analysis, but I was able to write a script that connects to the WHIMC database remotely to import tables as data frame objects and export them to Excel files in a local directory on my computer. I also wrote a script that calculates the Levenshtein distance (edit distance) between changes made to the directions stored in the Barrel Bot by the user every time they interact with it in the environment. It doesn't work perfectly yet, because it is still unclear which puzzle they are working on and when they complete that puzzle, but I'm proud of myself for getting as far as I have.
+
+On Tuesday, I attended my second CS Research Group meeting where we discussed how to improve an existing grant proposal for a research study, and then I went to my first Lunch and Learn where I was introduced to the staff hosting these sessions and other CS students who are here for the summer doing research in the CS department.
+
+On Wednesday, I attended the WHIMC Barrel Bot check-in meeting, my first strand3 meeting, and I had my weekly check-in meeting with Juan. Juan and I discussed the state of the data being collected and the code I've been working on. We discussed exploratory data analysis (EDA), how to make improvements to my code, and where to store calculated results. 
+
+I spent the remainder of my week working on my script and learning more about how I can use Pandas data structures to merge tables for EDA. Luc and I didn't have our normal check-in meeting until Friday because he was traveling, but I had lots to share with him by the time he got back.

_posts/2024-06-02-week4.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 4
+---
+## June 3 - June 7
+
+My fourth week has been a little disappointing because I wasn't able to accomplish as much as I hoped to. I was able to make some improvements to my existing scripts after I met with Luc on Monday, and he introduced me to pivot tables in Excel because I was curious about this method for data analysis. I also shared my scripts to calculate edit distance for users using loops with Juan, and he walked me through how to replace my loops with the apply method and lambda functions to make my script more efficient.
+
+After learning more about the apply, concat, and merge methods in Pandas earlier in the week, I had some ideas about how to move forward, but I struggled with the application of these methods on the data as it exists in the database because the plans I had were based on the data we collected on May 9th, and there have been several changes made to the database since then.
+
+Despite this setback, I attempted to merge tables in a variety of ways to see if looking at the existing data in a new way might give me some new incites, but most of the new tables I created were full of duplicates and null values. The only useful tables I produced were the ones I created by adapting some code that Juan sent to me to concatenate tables, instead of joining them. Regardless, I was hopeful that once I had some new data, the path forward would be less murky, and all I needed to get that new data was the go-ahead from Sam.
+
+Once Sam pushed all the latest updates, I logged into the server and worked through the first three puzzles Jeff had set up for me, toggling back and forth between the database and the learning environment, but something was wrong. Data was not logging in the tables I expected it to see it, but I wasn't certain this was an error. So, I went through every table in the database to find out what was being logged, and I exported that data to attempt to extract what I could from it. Just as I thought I had found something new and relevant, Jeff messaged me on Slack to tell me that there had been a system failure earlier in the week so they had to roll back all the updates they made on Monday, so any new data collected this week should be thrown out.
+
+At this point, I reached out to Luc and Juan to update them on the situation and ask for guidance on how to move forward. Luc had a couple of ideas for what I could do with the data in its current state, and he also suggested that I start working on the DREU Progress Report (3rd milestone) which is due at the end of the 5th week.

_posts/2024-06-09-week5.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 5
+---
+## June 10 - June 14
+
+I began my week drafting the progress report for the third DREU milestone and meeting with Luc to discuss my progress and findings from last week. I spent a good portion of the remainder of my week writing and debugging a script that merges tables to calculate the distance and time between interactions with the BarrelBot, and on Friday I used Matplotlib to create my first visualizations of this mock data. 
+
+I also dropped in on a strand1 meeting, which went in a direction I wasn't anticipating but found very interesting. They were discussing how to approach the design of pedagogical agent interventions for students whose first language is not American English. More specifically, they discussed Spanish and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I do not think that everyone was on the same page concerning these considerations.
+
+During my weekly meeting with Juan, we examined my most recent Python script to determine why it worked as intended for some sets of data, but not others. Ultimately, this led to the discovery of an edge case, where the user interacts with the BarrelBot more than once without movement between their interactions. Once I realized what was happening in the data, fixing the code was fairly simple.
+
+I also met with the WHIMC BarrelBot development team with Luc, and I attended the Lunch and Learn and CS research and reading groups, as usual, this week, where I met Colleen in person for the very first time. Colleen is the UIUC contact Luc introduced me to who coordinated my stay at Presby Hall and invited me to join these groups so I could meet other CS students. Accordingly, she was one of the presenters at this week's Lunch and Learn on networking. 
+
+During a breakout session, I met Tomas, a computer science student from Brazil who recently arrived at UIUC, and Evan, a machine learning major. By the end of Colleen's lecture, attendees were primed to meet and mingle, and I met several other students in quick succession, which was really nice and really overwhelming for me. Fortunately, I used what I had learned over lunch to introduce myself and express the genuine interest and curiosity I had for these other students before excusing myself so I could get back to work. 
+
+In reality, I don't think Luc would have minded if I had spent more time talking with other students. I just didn't want to come off as rude or disinterested when the truth is, I'm an autistic adult learning to honor where I'm at in my body when I don't have the energy and mental resources to socialize or when I'm experiencing sensory overwhelm because I'm in a large, loud, crowded room where I did not anticipate having to introduce myself to so many people at once. That said, I think I handled things to the best of my ability at that moment, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to spend more time with some of the people who took the time to approach me at next week's lecture.

_posts/2024-06-16-week6.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 6
+---
+## June 17 - June 21
+
+After meeting with Luc on Monday, I began to investigate process mining because he thought this would be a productive way to spend my time when I needed a break from coding. He said I should begin by crafting potential narratives about how students may approach problem-solving based on what I've learned from the mock data we have available. So, I took some time to gain some foundational knowledge on the process of process mining, and I created a table of events that occur in the learning environment that are representative of the data being collected. Then I wrote a short narrative of a user solving a puzzle, and I created another table to show how these events might show up in this scenario in the event log data. I shared this with Luc and he made some suggestions about using the data we have currently to find a starting point to define things like: how long will the user need to be engaged in an activity before it can be described as a long time or a short time. 
+
+Later in the week, I met with Juan. He agreed with Luc's approach to exploring the data visually with histograms to find natural breaking points in time, but he also suggested that I simplify these events to start, by removing things like 'long', 'short', 'many', and 'few', and create operational definitions for these simplified events. For instance, 'press-button' occurs when 'table' is 'action_physical and 'type' is 'STONE_BUTTON.'
+
+Luckily, Jeff was able to reset enough of the learning environment for me and Juan to create some new data on Tuesday afternoon. There are still some bugs to work out in the environment and the database, but the data we generated was very informative once I ran it through the scripts I combined this week, and I gained a lot of insight on how to adjust my code to move forward and learn even more! 
+
+While I was analyzing the new tables my scripts generated, I took notes to pass on to Luc and the WHIMC development team on which data was missing and how they might improve formatting on some of the new data from the learning environment. Moreover, I was delighted to find that the notes I was taking to extract this information for them, would also be beneficial for the process mining project because these notes have given me better insight on how I might create the operational definitions Juan suggested.
+
+Apart from all that, I attended the CS research and reading group meetings, a seminar on biohybrid robotics, and the weekly UIUC Lunch and Learn on advisors, mentors, and sponsors this week, and I am planning to attend the UIUC Lunch and Lawn Games Student Social this weekend.

_posts/2024-06-23-week7.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 7
+---
+## June 24 - June 28
+
+During my check-in meeting with Luc, we discussed an alternative to process mining for visualization using a free online research tool called Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). ENA creates visualizations that show relationships between co-occurrences, and a variation of this tool called ONA can be toggled on to pay respect to the order of events. The input for this tool is similar to the example input I found for process mining, and the application is user-friendly, so it's a more feasible option for analysis with the time I have remaining here.
+
+That said, I successfully combined all my working scripts into one script and devised some new features to clean and process the data in a way that allows user events to be seen more clearly alongside calculations, which may help to identify markers of struggle or persistence. For instance, the edit distance calculations indicate whether the user's choices are building toward or away from the solution for specific puzzles. 
+
+I used this processed data to create operational definitions, which I can use to reformat and output event data on users for ENA, and I have begun a new script to do so. I also took some time to create visualizations using Python and the Matplotlib library. Using this tool, I generated histograms to visualize the distribution of changes made during each interaction with the Barrel Bot across all users. The information this provides can be used in the future to set thresholds after data collection to define whether users are making big or small changes as they build toward a solution that allows Barrel Bot to navigate various obstacle courses in the learning environment.
+
+Luc and I met again this week to update Jeff Ginger on my latest findings after the WHIMC update last week, and we met again on Thursday to begin discussing the final report I need to write for my last DREU milestone. We crafted a basic outline and discussed where I should start looking for related work to include in my report.
+
+Beyond this, I read some research papers that Luc provided for me at our Monday meeting, and I learned more about what graduate school might be like during my weekly meeting with Juan, who will be graduating with his PhD in education next year.