February 18th, 2021

Today our assignment was to choose an object or mechanism that we were interested in exploring as well as sharing with the rest of the class. In beginning, I had no idea what object I wanted to talk about. Everything that I came up with didn’t seem to be a good object worth sharing to the class. That was when I came up with the Roomba. The Roomba is a robotic vacuum and I believed that many people should know about this item. I felt that many people should know about this item because this item can potentially change peoples’ lives. At first I wasn’t sure who the audience would be. I did know the purpose of this object, but the audience that I was trying to appeal to was different. In the beginning I was going to write that the audience would be everyone. However, after researching a bit I realized that I can’t simply just state that the audience would be everyone. I would need to specify my audience because not everyone would like to know about the robotic vacuum. Some would love to hear my thoughts about it and others would just ignore everything I say. One question that stumped me was “why does it matter to you”. I didn’t really know how to answer that question. The main reason as to why I chose this object was because I had one in my house and it made the cleaning process a little bit easier. After submitting my response, I was relieved. I was happy that I was finally able to move on and get ready for my next assignment. I had a couple of links that had some information about the Roomba as well as how it functions.

February 25th, 2021

Today is the day that we post our outlines of our Technical Description and have our peers respond to it. When I first saw the assignment, I told myself that it was easy because I have already written the draft. All I needed to do was to create an outline that reflects my draft. However, for some reason it actually took me longer than expected to come up with an outline. I was concerned as to what should go into my intro or the body paragraphs or the conclusion. Then the confusion led me to question whether I actually put everything in my draft. I was concerned about whether I had all the information that I needed. After coming up with an outline and posting it on the discussion board, I was hoping that some people would look at the outline and tell me what I would need to fix or maybe rearrange. After a while I saw that there was only one reply to my outline. I was honestly disappointed, but I took the reply to heart and tried to rearrange the things in my draft. Eventually, I felt as if there was nothing that I can do to improve my draft myself. I needed someone else to read my draft and to give me advice on what I should change and fix. Maybe I should’ve developed an outline first before jumping to typing up the first draft. If I had done so then maybe in my draft it will have everything that I want it to.

March 11th, 2021

For todays assignment, we were supposed to post a description of our topic as well as indicate which role we undertook. When talking to my group-mates, I didn’t really care that much about which role I would be. I ended up becoming the topic supervisor because the roles submission manager and research director was already taken. I had to come up with a topic for our group, but that was pretty simple due to how I already knew what my other group mates wanted to talk about regarding this project. Over the weekend, I had to make sure that we all understood what topic we were going to work on. I had to do this because I didn’t want anyone in our group to put down information that isn’t necessarily needed. In the end, our topic was the focus on the lack of funding that the NYC transit system receives. Before Covid-19 hit, there were already many problems with the transit system. There were delays, overcrowding, as well as signal slowdowns. Due to there already being many projects that had to be completed, the amount of money that the NYC transit has to work with isn’t much. There weren’t much projects being done to improve the NYC transit systems. Once covid-19 hit, the infrastructure of the transit systems has begun to decline. Even more money was required in order to repair the broken down infrastructures. Without enough funding, the NYC transit systems can’t do anything. I wasn’t entirely sure if this topic met the requirement of the topic needing to be an issue within the NYC infrastructure due to how we’re mainly going to be talking about the lack of funds. However, I decided to go with this because even though we are going to be talking about the lack of funds, we are also going to be talking about what we can do in order to change that and improve the NYC infrastructure at the same time.

March 23rd, 2021

Today, our main job was to self-assess our own memo draft. I looked through the list of what the professor wanted the memo to contain and I was looking through the list, my heart slowly dropped. I realized that there were many things that we (our group) haven’t done yet. I kept reading and there was one more important thing. The more important part of the memo was the recommendation that we are giving in order to potentially solve the problem. The recommendation had to be well supported by the summary and evidence that we’re providing. I was relieved when I read that because I knew that we had multiple sources to back up the recommendations that our group came up with. However, we still had the minor problems to worry about. We were still missing a title, headings, and subject lines. Later today, I talked with my group regarding these things and we came to the conclusion that our memo already included things like headings and subject lines. The one main thing we changed, was the title. We came up with multiple ideas for the title and eventually we ended up with “The New Era of Transportation; Solving Problems with Revolutionary Ideas”. I wasn’t sure about this title until the research director explained it to me. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the progress that our group has made. However, I feel that there are many things that our group can do in order to make our memo even better than it is now.

April 13th, 2021

Today, our main goal was to choose a piece of information that we have discovered during our research and to explain how it relates to our lab report in a single paragraph. I chose two pieces of information, but I feel that the main piece of information that’ll help out my lab report the most is, “If the system spots a pattern in a new driving situation that the control system was unable to handle in the past, the driver will be warned in advance of a possible critical situation”. This piece of information is important for my lab report because it supports my claim about the future vehicles. In my lab report, I plan on talking about how there will be self-driving cars in the future and how there are many advantages and disadvantages of them. However, eventually as time goes on, those disadvantages will disappear. I plan on using that piece of information in order to prove that the disadvantages slowly disappear. That piece of information essentially gives people a sense of relief when it comes to the disadvantage, safety. People believe that safety is one of the main concerns of a self-driving vehicle due to how the system controls everything. The piece of information that I chose mainly talks about how a new system that warns the driver when a critical situation is approaching and that the driver should take over. With this info I plan on talking about how with this new system, people wouldn’t have to worry as much about the safety of being in a self-driving vehicle.

April 15th, 2021

Today, the main goal was to form an outline for our lab reports. In the beginning, I was unsure on how to do my lab report outline. I didn’t know what information I should put for each of the required sections in our lab report. While I was contemplating on what to put for my outline, I looked at other peoples’ outlines in order to get an idea on what I should be putting in my outline. All of the outlines that I saw had a lot of detail as well as information. Eventually, I got an idea on what to put for each section. One problem I had when typing up my outline was that I was unsure on what to put for the sections Materials and Methods and Results. Regarding the materials and methods section, I planned on talking about the reasons why many people didn’t want to buy self-driving cars as well as including charts in order to support my claim. However, I wasn’t too sure about this idea because this section is mainly supposed to be mainly about what was done by some people, like experiments or surveys. In addition, I planned on talking about how there were new systems that were being developed by researchers in the results section. However, that section is mainly for talking about the results of the materials and methods section. Where the data tables and charts would go. Because of this, I wasn’t too sure about my outline. But I decided to go with it and that I would make changes when I actually type up my lab report.

April 20th, 2021

Today, was the day we do the lab report peer review. However, I completely forgot that there was a peer review for lab reports draft today, so I had to quickly finish my lab report draft. I was already half-way done and I emailed the professor to let him know that I completely forgot about it. He told me that I can just submit it as it was because it was just a draft, but I didn’t want to do that since it wouldn’t represent how my final piece may look like. My partner was Dorothy and she had a really nice draft. Her draft fulfilled all of the requirements that the professor said our lab report needed. The first thing I noticed after reading her draft, was that it was only 3 pages long. My draft on the other hand was 6 pages long, double the amount that my partner had. When my partner peer reviewed mine, the first thing she stated that the max amount of pages for the lab report was 3 pages. I immediately went to go check on the emails that the professor sent out regarding the lab report, and I finally found the email that stated that the lab report is only supposed to be 3 pages long. I knew that this was going to be a major setback for me and I also knew that this was my fault. If I read the email more closely, then this would’ve never happened. Another thing that Dorothy said that really stuck with me was that I was repeating a lot of things. I already knew from the beginning that this was going to be a problem in any essay or research paper that I do. When I was younger, my teachers and peer editors would always tell me that I was repeating too much. I tried to get rid of this weakness that I had, but it seemed that even to this day I still can’t overcome it.

April 29th, 2021

The main goal of the discussion forum for today is to provide an update for our topic ideas for the engineering proposals. On April 27th, our assignment was to brainstorm some ideas for our next big assignment. I came up with the idea to talk about how the rapid growing advances in our technology isn’t always a good thing. When I originally came up with this idea, I first believed that it was going to be fine and that I would find a lot of information on how technological advances aren’t always a good thing. However, as I did some research, there weren’t many articles on how advances in technology can be a bad thing. Although there were like 1 or 2 articles, I believed that it wasn’t enough. As a result, for our assignment today, I decided to completely change my topic idea. I decided to change my idea to how technology actually benefits people as well as how advancements in technology is a good thing and in what ways was our technology becoming more advanced. As I was typing my updated topic idea, I still wasn’t sure if this was the right call. All of my previous posts and papers talked about something that was technology related as well as how they were beneficial to society. I felt like I wanted to write about something different this time. Something that everyone can actually relate to. I believe that it’s a good thing to always think ahead about our future and what can happen, but I also feel that it’s sometimes important to address the problems that we currently have.

May 4th, 2021

Before I even looked at what our assignment was for today, I saw that I received an email from my professor. In the email, the professor talks about how today we would have to post a topic proposal and that we can take this opportunity to make this the introduction to our engineering proposal. The one thing that stuck out to me the most, was the line saying that our topic can not change after today. This was concerning for me. I already figured out that I wanted to do something different this time and that I wanted to talk about something that everyone can relate to. I wasn’t exactly sure on what to write about until I saw my cousin who refused to do his homework and just wanted to keep on staring at his phone. That was when an idea hit me. I decided that I wanted to talk about smartphone addiction. I believed that this would be a good topic to talk about because everyone has experienced or knows someone who just wants to look at their phones for the whole day and nothing else. The new topic that I chose was how we could implement a new AI system that would warn the user if they were on their phone for too long and that if they kept on going, the system would force shut down the phone until the end of the day. This new topic was a complete 180 from the one I proposed on April 29th, however I was confident and actually liked this one. After I posted my topic proposal in the discussion board, I was hoping that I would get some decent comments on my topic proposal. After some time I saw that I had 2 comments. Out of the 2 comments, I was really happy that someone named Ayah Ali talked about how important this topic proposal would be. She mentioned how the newer generations are becoming more addicted to their phones and that results in wasted time and missed opportunities. I was happy when I saw this comment because this was exactly what I was planning on talking about when I type out my draft.

May 11th, 2021

Today was the day we peer edit our engineering proposal drafts. Unlike before, I actually completed the draft and was ready to post it onto the discussion board. However, unlike last time, I wasn’t confident in my draft. I tried to make my draft as similar as the one in the textbook, however there were many things I wasn’t sure about. I wanted to emailed the professor and ask him a couple of questions, however I decided not to because I wanted to be able to solve this problem myself. I looked at other peoples’ drafts and I saw that most of them talked about the budget and the costs of their proposal and I didn’t have that. I knew that I was going to have to include that information in for my final draft. Currently, I’m waiting on my partner to respond and have some feedback for me. While waiting, I have found some information regarding the budget and the cost of an AI system.

May 13th, 2021

The assignment for May 13th was the very last assignment for this class. However, I completely forgot to do the assignment. I remember telling myself that I’ll do it and eventually I completely forgot about it. The main goal of the assignment was to talk about what writing meant to us and what role has it taken in our lives. We also needed to talk about how our perception of writing has changed as well as what role it may take in our lives moving forward. To be honest, writing was never really something I liked. I always viewed writing as something that had to be done for my English classes and that was it. I never really liked it because I wasn’t really good at it. I was never good at analyzing articles or quotes. Usually I would also repeat some statements too. Many people would tell me that I have to learn how to analyze the quotes more deeply and that I need to stop repeating statements. However, no matter how hard I tried, these flaws of mine still seem apparent. Every time I write an essay or research paper, I don’t have confidence and I always believe that it’ll receive a low grade. However, as of now, writing helped me realize something. It helped me realize what I was actually interested in. While I was in this course, we had to do many papers. We were given the opportunity to choose what we wanted to talk about in our paper. Looking back, all the topics that I’ve ever done have been on technology and how they impact our society in both positive and negative ways. After writing all of these papers, I have come to the realization that I liked talked about how technology benefits or negatively affects people. I liked talking about how technology is becoming more and more advanced everyday. I believe that writing, offers a creative experience. I know that as I grow up and take more courses, writing is going to become more and more relevant as well as important. I hope that as I continue to keep writing, I will discover more of what I am truly passionate about.