Hello there,

Here’s another timely blog post (sorry Suloni, I’ll get better!) regarding what I’ve been doing!

1. Proposal to Professor Raizen
   • After much excavation and researching about the Hebrew course’s flash modules, I pitched the idea of overhauling the course by using Quizlet. Here’s what I mean:
   • 
   • This module involves simply filling in the blank by selecting the right vocab word. Applying this to Quizlet, we could have one side of the flashcard be the sentence with the fill-in-the-blank field, and the other side of the flashcard be the correct vocab word.
   • I wrote up a formal proposal email to Dean Raizen listing out the perks of switching over the modules to Quizlet, and am still working on getting her input!
2. Documentation for CLIO
   • Since CLIO is a fairly tricky tool to use, Chloe and Suloni wanted me to write documentation on how to visually style the assignment pages to enhance learning.
   • 
   • After writing the first draft, I got a ton of feedback from Suloni about how to write better documentation while giving more context, and so I’m still making revisions to the page right now.
3. WordPress – Life and Letters
   • This is an exciting project that I was recently assigned to and will be working with Stacy on. No visuals just yet as I’ve just been onboarded but I’m super excited to learn more about web dev!
   • Project Introduction:
     • Project: Redesign of Life and Letters webpage
       Client: Life and Letters readers; Allen Quigley
       Completion Status: Started Sept. 30
       Staff Guidance: Stacy Vlasits
       STA Team Members: N/A
       Plans: Recreate the webpage by working with CSS, WordPress, PHP (?!), and HTML.
       To be completed: By the end of this year? (Not too sure about this)

Until next time~

Hello,

Yesterday, I started working on designing the 2019-20 STA banner, which meant messing around with Photoshop.

I haven’t used Photoshop that much.

Meaning, I spent some time trying to figure out how to do simple things, like clipping an image inside a shape so that if the image extends beyond the shape, it’s hidden. But either way, I sort of got to learn how layer masking works, like if you add a mask onto an already existing layer, the masking layer can only contain white (meaning show this part of the picture), black (meaning hide this part of the picture), or somewhere in-between (show the picture but make it transparent kind of…). Even though this feature wasn’t relevant to what I was trying to do (just clip an image inside a shape), it was still super cool to learn.

Here’s what I ended up with:

Mission accomplished!

Hey there,

I just wanted to give some quick updates on what I’ve been working on, one of which is Cascade training. Basically, the training is supposed to give me a better understanding of how to use Cascade (i.e. adding content and formatting it properly, linking it to external pages, adding new pages + dropdowns, etc.) It’s pretty interesting to see how simple it is to use a CMS as opposed to manually doing everything through HTML/CSS. Here’s what it looks like right now!

Other than Cascade training, I’ve also been work a lot with handling Adobe Flash Player remediation on a Hebrew course made by Dean Esther Raizen who’s part of COLA. To rundown what the root of the issue is, the Hebrew course contains learning modules that were built in Flash. This is (or was) fine and dandy, but Adobe announced that they were deprecating Flash Player in December of 2020, meaning that these modules would stop working. Thus, in order to make sure that students will still have access to the modules once it’s deprecated, we wanted to find a way to convert the modules to HTML5.

After doing some exploration, I learned that there was really no way for us to convert the modules directly from .SWF (Small Web Format) into HTML as .SWF is a compressed file format that doesn’t really preserve the interactivity + animations when you try to uncompress it. Thus, after working with Chris Pittman and Ruben Garza, we decided that the best approach would just be to extract whatever information we can from these modules, and then start thinking about rebuilding using what we already have.

Now, I’ve parallelized the process of extracting all ~120 Flash modules and am lucky to have the help of Jalisa and Thuy. We’re working on pulling out all the Hebrew text + images and saving them onto Box, and we should be through all the modules in no time.

Hello again!

I’ve finished most of the onboarding procedures and have started getting into the groove of things now! Last week, I made a presentation slide explaining 5 things from the STA handbook:

I chose to go with quite a minimal and straight-to-the-point design for the slides because of the nature of the content. 🙂

I’ve also been working on setting up Adobe IDs to address the licensing issues on the MEZ lab computers, which is frankly something that I didn’t expect to be doing on my first week but it was a fun time!

Aside from that, Suloni assigned to me a small addition on the Hebrew course page that would essentially notify students that they needed Flash Player to run the tutorial modules. After getting all the necessary directory permissions and talking to Dean Raizen to figure out what exactly I needed to add, I added the small small change in:

Hello there!

This marks the beginning of my STA blog, which is where I’m hoping to keep track of the varying and interesting work I’ll be doing throughout my time here. A little bit about me: my name is Kevin Dao, I’m an upcoming junior majoring in Computer Science hopefully with a certificate in Design Strategies. So far today, I’ve been going through some basic onboarding, getting access to all the tools like Harvest and Basecamp, and meeting the other awesome STAs who I’ll be working with.

As I come from a more technical background (as a CS major), I’m hoping to familiarize myself with the more creative side of work, specifically the Adobe Creative Suite. I’m also hoping to get a breadth of experience working on many different projects and developing a wider skillset.

I’m quite excited to work with Suloni and the rest of the STA team, all who come from such different backgrounds with unique stories to tell. Overall, super pumped to see where this journey will go and what I’ll learn and contribute along the way there!