Meet Team WorkSpace!
Team WorkSpace includes me (middle), Poorvi (right), and Diego (left). We all had a blast following WorkSpace through from its conception to where the app is now.
Computer Science is a course taught by Mrs. Taricco at Mass Academy. To start the year in August, we learned about effective website design and transitioned into designing our own websites using HTML and CSS. In fact, this whole website was made using these two languages! After our websites officially “went live” in September, we began learning the Java programming language. In class, we cover everything from iterations to different types of arrays. For practice, we also complete a lot of coding exercises that involve logic and efficient problem-solving skills. Starting in January, our class is also competing in the American Computer Science League (ASCL). I am also preparing to take the AP Computer Science A Exam at the end of the year. Take a look at two of my favorite projects from the ones I have completed so far!
Apps For Good: WorkSpace
Developers: Kiara Lavana, Poorvi Mohanakrishnan, Diego Suchenski Loustanau
Advisor: Angela Taricco (Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science)
Team WorkSpace includes me (middle), Poorvi (right), and Diego (left). We all had a blast following WorkSpace through from its conception to where the app is now.
WorkSpace is an app that streamlines teenage job recruitment. We saw a need among teenagers looking for minimum-wage, entry-level jobs, most of whom are first time workers. Most of the current job-finding apps on the market are targeted towards an adult demographic and lack sufficient minimum-wage job listings for a productive search. Many teenagers find the process of first-time job finding as daunting, not knowing how to balance finding the right place to work, especially when weighing the multiplicity of factors involved in the job search process (age, location, field, availability, etc.). Since Worcester has a variety of communities, all with different access to resources that could help with job recruitment, WorkSpace also aims to make job finding more equitable for all teenagers.
WorkSpace is designed for two primary demographics. The first audience are teenagers, entry-level workers, or really anyone looking to work in a minimum wage job. Because our app utilizes a lot of video and graphic features, WorkSpace is also user-friendly for non-native English speakers. A second target audience are the actual companies looking to market their job openings to a new pool of workers.
App Description: WorkSpace is an app designed to streamline teenage job recruitment by algorithmically matching users to partnered companies on the app. Users input their age, location, interests, and other "filters," while companies create accounts to market their requirements, location, and openings. The app implements short videos to advertise the ranked companies in a digestible format to individual users. In all, this app aims to aid both minimum-wage workers in finding local opportunities and businesses in advertising their positions to new workers.
Here is the app architecture for WorkSpace. There are 2 main pathways a user can take– either they start as a job-finding user or an advertising company. Job-finding user data is stored locally via shared preferences. Company users make WorkSpace accounts to store all of their data on the cloud. A matching algorithm compares the data of the user to the company datasets in the Firebase database. A ranked list of the most relevant companies is generated for each user. Video advertisements are then displayed to the user based on the algorithmically ranked company order. Users can move between the videos in the feed by using the “previous” and “next” buttons.
The minimum viable product is an app that can display different job opportunities to users based on a set of input filters. Location will be the highest prioritized filter, followed by age, industry field, and availability. The app can also advertise these companies through a continuous feed of video advertisements.
Feel free to learn about our app by reading our official App Propsal! Or reach out to me (knlavana@wpi.edu), Poorvi (pmohanakrishnan@wpi.edu), or Diego (desuchenskiloust@wpi.edu).
Bulgarian Solitaire was a code we worked on in November. The code takes a triangular number of cards and plays Bulgarian solitaire until the piles have sizes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9… in some order. In every round, one card is taken from each pile and made into its new pile. It can be shown that you always end up with such a configuration if the deck size is a triangular number. For this project, I actually got to reuse some of my older code that produced triangular numbers after prompting the user to enter in a number in order to calculate its cumulative sum from 1. I used this code in a portion of this piece so my user could enter in any number they wanted instead of only triangular numbers!
For this exercise, we were tasked with designing a class that represents a star. Using some basic trigonometry, geometry, static arrays, and some random colors, I designed an applet that draws ten random starts of random sizes, locations, and colors. Although this exercise seemed daunting at first, once you figured out the math behind drawing stars, coding the applet to construct a star was really fun. Check out an example of what the applet produces when run!
