Completion of RUS407 Animations!

It’s official! After about 1 and a half semesters of work I have completed all of the RUS407 animations for the Powerpoint videos! It’s been such a blast learning the ins and outs of this program and working to create more complex and visually entertaining animations that will keep students’ attention while they watch the PPT videos. In this post I included a video of all of the cartoons used for the Unit 10 Verbs of Motion, which were some of the very first animations I completed for the class. Can’t wait to get started on the next semester of animations;^)

On my last day, I wanted to give a quick run-down of the project I was most involved with in my time working as an STA this semester.

Two years ago when I started as an STA, I was brought on to spearhead the front-end for Clio, a new type of online class management software that provided dynamic content, user analytics, Canvas integration, and a compelling and fluid design to the paradigm of how we run online classes here at UT.

In the year since its completion last fall, Clio has been adopted by over 1,000 users at the University, and is slated to expand into other arenas as well. The expansion, then, necessitates changes in the platform to keep up with the demands of our users. This semester, I rebuilt the grading interface of Clio from the ground up – every part of the grading stack was changed and streamlined into a simpler, faster API-driven platform with a Vue.js front-end that interfaces with our Laravel backend through REST APIs.

Part of the redesign necessitated the back-end editors, graders, and other administrative interfaces to have the same visual style as our Material Design-driven front-end. Using Vuetify, I redesigned the front-end of the grading interface, and wrote Vue components that were semantic and re-usable for future Angular-to-Vue migrations.

With the help of Vuex, we could maintain global application state and pass data/events between different components quickly and easily. By converting the original Laravel->Blade->Angular design pattern to Laravel->REST API->Vue, we separated concerns and made it easier to make changes to the backend without having to worry about all the implicit links it had to front-end templates.

Ultimately, being able to build on the full-stack and creating an end-to-end product in about a month and a half (I started on the project in mid-October) is an incredible learning experience, and will help me greatly in the future as a software engineer. From here on, I will be in Hong Kong for a study abroad semester, and will spend the summer with JPMorgan Chase in New York as a software engineering intern.

Before I go, I’d like to thank Suloni Robertson for giving me the opportunity to return as an STA and work on the project that matters to me the most, Chris Pittman for his unending patience and sage technical advice, and Marla Gilliand for managing Clio from its inception.

In addition to my duties with Texas Beyond History and Canvasser, I was assigned to recreate a COLA website using HTML, CSS, and Javascript with Rodrigo. We are being supervised by one of the developers–Stacy Vlasits–and are using Git to manage code changes. This is a much more technical project than TBH, but thanks to my experience with web design prior to this job I haven’t encountered any major impediments yet.

I also updated the Department of American Studies’s banner a few times using our content management system Cascade too!

German Frame

I’ve also been working on a project for Stacy involving completely replicating this website using wordpress:

I’ve learnt a lot about CSS/HTML in this project which is cool because that’s probably the career I want to be a web developer in the future. It’s a little different working with WordPress because you don’t really get to create the HTML elements you are more working directly with the CSS to kind of “hack” the website into looking the way you want. For example the top portion with the green quarter circles, I used WordPress widgets and modified the CSS for them to have that green quarter circle background. The code for that was:

This is essentially the process for every part of the website.

Many things have changed since I finished Rockshelter. I got a new interactive assignment but also a whole new project! I’ve been spending half my time collaborating on a website for a French class with a different section of LAITS (more on that later).

On to the interactive: the challenge here is that it’s a long one. More than 30 slides! This is why we split the work between Bryan, Nick and I. Here are some pictures of my slides. I can’t show the video but I added some more animations than the original to make it fun for the kids.

You get the gist. The kids have to take the little armadillo on a journey to find the secrets of ancient poops! I think it’s pretty fun how you get to move him around the screen sometimes and it was fun to make.