STA Blog

LAITS Student Technology Assistants collaborate with the College of Liberal Arts faculty and administration by re-imagining their instructional and promotional projects with a creative use of video, audio, web and graphic design. STAs learn technical skills on the job with LAITS development studio staff. They build presentations, produce audio/visual works, scan text documents & perform image correction. STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for instructional technology projects used to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

First 2 Weeks as an STA

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I’ve just completed my first two weeks as a Student Technology Assistant for UT LAITS. Here are some of the projects and tasks that I’ve been working on:
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For the Texas Beyond History project, I went through the Coastal Prehistoric site (Lay of the Land) and edited the HTML in order to transfer the old TBH website’s content to the new TBH website.

 

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I also went through the South Texas Plains map on the old TBH website and obtained the XY coordinates of all squares, circles, and triangles. The data gathered will be used to pinpoint the locations on the South Texas Plains map on the new TBH website.

 

screen-shot-2016-09-07-at-12-23-22-pm screen-shot-2016-09-07-at-11-18-08-amI’ve done some work on the Texas Pacos Mountains & Basins page as well. I reformatted the circle links in Ancient Places such that when clicked upon, they no longer create pop-up windows (as the old TBH site did) but rather the content pops up underneath and on the same page.

 

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The user-interface of this new layout wasn’t good, so I went into Photoshop and drafted a mock-up of a design that Suloni, Ruben, and I discussed might be a good option.

 

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Lastly, some ID processing!

Java Programming

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I also learned the basics of Java programming. I learned coding through Lynda.com, a pdf textbook, and Practiceit.com (as below). I’ve learned up to different types of methods, and now I am moving to objects.

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CoLA Staff ID Processing

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I processed more than a dozen ID Photos for CoLA graduate students and faculty. Some of the photos needed cleanups in Photoshop. Above shows the before and after of the staff profile photos.

PSY333D

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Request:Create an animation with the different stages of children ( baby, toddler, 5-year old, and 10 year old). Each child at different stages will walk behind an object and then ” grow” to the next stage. Baby crawling then moves behind bear and is a toddler. Toddler walking and then moves behind abc blocks and turns in to 5 year old. 5 year old walks and then moves behind “bush, tree, …?” and turns into 10 year old. 10 year old starts off walking and notices a little girl waiting for him and they both run off to play ground.

Professor:

Project Managers: Ashley Schenker

STA’s : Anna Xu

Character Design References: https://www.pinterest.com/characterdesigh/

First found references for drawing baby’s and toddlers. Tend to be more rounder with bigger heads.


My Character Design:

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Progress So Far:

My role is to create the animations and I am collaborating with out fellow STA Anna who will be creating the props that the character moves behind.

I think you can tell by the fluidity of each of the animations that there was a point when I got used to the movement. The baby is a bit glitchy and then the walk cycle of the toddler is a bit smoother but the arms are a bit strange. By the third walk cycle of the toddler I feel like I got a hand of it and by the 10 year old I was satisfied with the animation and moved onto completing the color. Might need to change the colors a bit since it differed from the ones on my computer screen.