Today, we continued to work on our Shaders project, and we have a presentable project! I can’t wait to present what we have worked on, I’m really proud of our accomplishments with shaders. Later today, we had a meeting with Birdie where we learned about how empathy works. We had to leave early in order to be on time for our presentation.

I found the GenderMag presentation to be very interesting in the way that they decided to account for diversity in their users. Instead of deciding how users would behave based off of race or gender, they instead base user behavior off of individual personalities, which I feel is a more universal scale. This is important for debugging, as it makes the product more accessible to a broader audience. One invention, the curb cut, has made life so much simpler for everyone. The main takeaway of this lecture was that even though we as a society might not realize the problems with the status quo, by paying attention to the needs of people, we end up making life better for everyone.

Today, we presented our project to Neil. Everything was working, until a script was added that broke the audio. We spent an hour trying to figure out what caused the audio to stop playing. Even now, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t work. However, we were able to build the project into an executable without errors, and we can still manually play the music by pressing the spacebar. We made some tweaks to the environment, changing the texture on some of the audience, but we are almost ready to begin testing.

During Craft of Research, we learned the proper way to visually represent data. This will come in handy for our research paper, as we will have to display our cortisol findings. We came to consensus that for the results that we are getting, it makes the most sense to make a line graph that measures the cortisol. levels in the control group, and the cortisol levels while conducting the stress task.

In the evening, some of us went hiking at Ledges. It was a peaceful walk and I enjoyed looking at nature in Iowa.

Here are some pictures I took along the hike:

I improved the game I made in Unity today. In addition to adding controls that control the directional light in the scene, I also added controls for the player character to move around the environment. Here’s what I have so far:

This is the code I used to move the character around:

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class Movement : MonoBehaviour
{
    public float speed = 20f;
    public Animator anim;
    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {
        anim.GetComponent<Animator>();
    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        Vector3 pos = transform.position;

        if (Input.GetKey("w"))
        {
            pos.z -= speed * Time.deltaTime;
            anim.Play("Run");
        }
        if (Input.GetKey("s"))
        {
            pos.z += speed * Time.deltaTime;
            anim.Play("Run");
        }
        if (Input.GetKey("d"))
        {
            pos.x -= speed * Time.deltaTime;
            anim.Play("Run");
        }
        if (Input.GetKey("a"))
        {
            pos.x += speed * Time.deltaTime;
            anim.Play("Run");
        }


        transform.position = pos;

    }
}

Here’s what I used to turn the lights on and off:

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class LightsToggle : MonoBehaviour
{
    private bool on;
    public Light sun;
    public float onIntensity = 1.0f;
    float offIntensity = 0.0f;
    Color color1 = Color.red;
    Color color2 = Color.blue;


    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {
        sun = GetComponent<Light>();
        on = true;
    }

    public void OnPressed()
    {

        if (Input.GetKeyDown("space"))
        {
            if (on)
            {
                sun.intensity = offIntensity;
                on = false;
            }
            else
            {
                //float t = Mathf.PingPong(Time.time, onIntensity) / onIntensity;
                //sun.color = Color.Lerp(color1, color1, t); 
                sun.intensity = onIntensity;
                //GetComponent<Renderer>().material.color = Random.ColorHSV(0f, 1f, 1f, 1f, 0.5f, 1f);
                on = true;
            }
        }
    }


    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        OnPressed();
    }
}

Some ways that I’m thinking about improving this project is by adding a running animation to the character when it moves. I also think that having a larger environment to walk around in and a clearer objective would make for a better game. Today, we also had to choose the Deeper Dive that we are interested in. The one that I most look forward to is GPU programming, as I feel that learning more about topics such as shaders will make me a better computer scientist.

Today, we had our last day of SolidWorks.  I feel that I’ve grown a lot since Monday when it comes to modeling parts, and then assembling them together.  We also began Maya today, which I feel will be more comfortable for me, because I have used Blender in the past.  However, once I began, it felt like an entirely different ballgame than Blender, partially due to the fact that the controls were messed up because of something to do with the GPU.  However, I feel that I was still able to get a grasp of modelling with this software, and I feel that if I continue to practice, I’ll be able to make something great.

It was a rough start for me today.  I woke up an hour late for work. It was a real reminder that I need to manage my time better so that I can go to bed at a reasonable time, so that this does not happen again.  Besides that, the VR Stress team had a meeting at Birdie’s house where we discussed more about our project, learned how to take spit samples, and went on a goat walk. At the end of the day, we had yoga, which I thought I was not going to like.  However, I found that it was actually very relaxing, and a great exercise.

Today, we had our final class of C++.  We learned about classes and object inheritance within a C++ project, and we created an example program to understand the concept.  We also got assigned the task of creating a Shape Manager Class for our Square, Circle and Triangle Classes. In addition, my group and I continued to improve our problem paragraph for our research.  I feel that the more we continue to rework our paragraph, the better our work gets.

Today, we learned more about C++, beginning to look into flow control and loops. We learned about if-else statements, switch statements, and while, do while and for loops.  The importance of these in C++ cannot be overstated. In addition, my group and I worked more on our problem paragraph, which I feel is going well. I’m working on a program that reads in data from an Excel sheet and prints it out to the console so the user can interact with it.  I’ve never read in an Excel file, but I’ve used a text file before, so I copied the data from the spreadsheet and put it in a text file, just to try and get it to work in a familiar setting. Once I get it working there, I’ll find out how to read in the Excel file.

#include <iostream>
#include <Windows.h>
//You need to modify this program to do the following steps
//1. Depending on their choice ask for corresponding values and print them out(almost done for you)
//1 b.See if you can change the if statements to a switch case
//2. Put entire structure in a loop that runs until I press q
//3. Make sure it checks for bad values(-ve numbers, words ? )
//4. Add perimeter calculations as separate choices
//*

using namespace std;

int main()
{
	int length;
	int breadth;

	int lengthsquare;

	float radius;

	cout << "1. Rectangle area" << endl;
	cout << "2. Square area" << endl;
	cout << "3. Circle area" << endl;
	cout << "What is your choice?" << endl;
	char choice;
	cin >> choice;
	while (choice != 'q'){
		switch (choice)
		{
		case '1':
			cout << "What length?: ";
			cin >> length;
			cout << "What breadth?: ";
			cin >> breadth;
			cout << length * breadth << endl;
			break;
		case '2':
			cout << "What length?: ";
			cin >> lengthsquare;
			cout << endl << lengthsquare * lengthsquare << endl;
			break;
		case '3':
			cout << "What is the radius?:";
			cin >> radius;
			cout << endl << 3.14 * (radius*radius) << endl;
			break;

		default:
			cout << "I don't understand.\n";

		}
		cout << "1. Rectangle area" << endl;
		cout << "2. Square area" << endl;
		cout << "3. Circle area" << endl;
		cout << "What is your choice?" << endl;
		cin >> choice;
	}

	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

#include <iostream>
#include <math.h>


using namespace std;

int fib(int n);

int main()
{
	cout << "Tell me how far you want to fib?" << endl;
	int choice;
	cin >> choice;

	cout << fib(choice + 1) << endl;

	//TODO:Print out nth fibonacci number
	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

int fib(int n)
{
	if ((n == 1) || (n == 2))
		return n - 1;

	else
		return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2);
}

Today, we began our first lesson in learning the C++ programming language.  We started the class by creating a very simple C++ program, which outputted “Hello World!” to the screen.  Afterwards, we learned more about the syntax of C++, and the importance of semicolons in a C++ program. When we finished, we were given time to play around with the language for ourselves.  I used the time to create a program that looped through an array of strings to list all of the values, in addition to beginning work on creating a program that can take an arbitrary amount of numbers to create a diamond from asterisks.  One aspect of this class that I am looking forward to is the creation of graphical user interfaces in C++ using the Qt toolkit. I am also looking forward to furthering my skill with C++ in general, by learning more information about the language.

Here is the array loop:

// REU Projects.cpp : This file contains the 'main' function. Program execution begins and ends there.
//

#include "pch.h"
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
#include <string>

//This is a hello world program; It says "Hello World!"

void ListOfPrograms(int a);
void HelloWorld();
void WriteChoices();
void FoodFavorite();
void Arrays();
void MultiplyAndDivide();

int main()
{
	int choice;
	std::cout << "Hello! Choose Your Program: ";
	WriteChoices();
	std::cin >> choice;
	ListOfPrograms(choice);
	while (choice != 0) {
		std::cout << "Hello! Choose Your Program: ";
		WriteChoices();
		std::cin >> choice;
		ListOfPrograms(choice);
	}

	return 0;
}

void WriteChoices() {
	std::cout << "\n0: Quit\n1: Hello World\n2: Favorite Food\n3:Arrays\n4:Multiply and Divide\n";
}
void HelloWorld() {
	std::string HelloWorld[3] = { "Hello World!", "Hello\nWorld", "H l o W r d\n e l   o l" };
	for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
		std::cout << HelloWorld[i] << std::endl;
	}
}
void FoodFavorite() {
	std::string food;
	std::cout << "What is your favorite food?: ";
	std::cin >> food;
	std::cout << "Your favorite food is " << food << std::endl;
}
void Arrays() {
	std::string array[3];
	std::cout << "Enter a string: ";
	std::cin >> array[0];
	std::cout << "Enter a string: ";
	std::cin >> array[1];
	std::cout << "Enter a string: ";
	std::cin >> array[2];

	for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
		std::cout << "String [" << i << "]: " << array[i] << std::endl;
}

void MultiplyAndDivide() {
	int numArray[4];
	std::cout << "Enter the first number: ";
	std::cin >> numArray[0];
	std::cout << "Enter the second number: ";
	std::cin >> numArray[1];
	std::cout << "Enter the third number: ";
	std::cin >> numArray[2];
	std::cout << "Enter the fourth number: ";
	std::cin >> numArray[3];

	std::cout << "The result is: " << (numArray[0] * numArray[1]) / (numArray[2] + numArray[3]) << std::endl;
}

void ListOfPrograms(int a) {
	switch (a)
	{
	case 0:
		std::cout << "Goodbye!\n";
		break;
	case 1:
		HelloWorld();
		break;
	case 2: 
		FoodFavorite();
		break;
	case 3:
		Arrays();
		break;
	case 4:
		MultiplyAndDivide();
		break;
	default:
		std::cout << "I don't understand\n";
	}
}

This is the first post in the REU Program

• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F

This will be a fun summer!