CST 205 Week 5

Week 5

This week has been pretty relaxed (maybe because it was Thanksgiving?). There wasn't nearly as much work as there has been previous weeks. The readings were geared toward debugging. All of the assignments were team projects and basically were compiled into one primary game. The game is a text based choose your own adventure style, like Zork. The idea is pretty simple, but we went through a few different ways to implement the project to make it easiest to develop on. As usual, meeting with the team has been pretty difficult... but we figured it out in the end. I still think we could use some guidance on pair programming. A team of 4 all typing at once in codeshare.io is a bit crazy and I think everyone would benefit from learning how to pair program properly when remote (one "driver" and more dialogue). We have the code for our game on our team's GitHub Adventure Game Repository.

Assigned Readings

Silicon Valley's Race to Hack Happiness by Emma Seppälä, Ph.D (Huffington Post)

This article discussed how people and companies are beginning to create or hold competitions to create applications to help with mental disorders and make people happier. The author explains that depression has increased and more people are looking for ways to make themselves happier, like going to yoga, reading self help books, and now looking for applications to boost their mood. These applications seem fine. Using technology for things that could benefit people seems like a good thing. However, there wasn't any data to back up if these applications are helping or not. Because of this, I'm hesitant to say that this is a good route to take to come out of depression at this time.