Author: Murray Wu Lu

I listened to the podcast “Home of the Brave: Running After Antelope“.

The premise for the podcast was how the speaker would talk walks and run around through the woods of Wyoming and see animals in his surrounding, primarily antelopes. Not only this, but he talks about how when he is surrounded in this environment, he is able to feel a sense of serenity as he is inside a gentle and quiet environment full of nature. Furthermore, he talks about how animals and organisms separate from each other by how they interact as time goes by as well as the “running hypothesis” that they talked about. I found this podcast to be really interesting cause in many ways, I could relate to this. The running hypothesis proposed how animals could run differently from one another and would create their own ways of hunting or catching animals. While certain animals may be better runners than others, they are still able to find ways to hunt that adapt to their own bodies. For instance, his dogs were able to run much faster and used less the amount of energy than people do. However, the way that the people hunt was far more efficient than his dog despite not being as physically fast.

Website

Description: For our project, we decided to make a website that would showcase the different and diverse experience that a student from NYU Abu Dhabi would experience as well as the experience that an NYU Shanghai student would have. When you start, you are directed to an admissions page where you can choose either the NYU Abu Dhabi route or the NYU Shanghai Route.

Process:  In the beginning, we wanted to create this project with a mix between hand-drawn pictures and actual photographs. Not only that, we wanted that for each slide, one would be able to see the direct comparison between going to Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. Some of these comparisons could be the scenery that both cities had to offer as well as the different cuisine’s that are available. We then found that photographs were much more compelling than hand drawings since the audience would be able to have a better time visualizing the experience of being in that city despite never having traveled there. We used images from our own lives and also asked from other’s what their experience was like within their city so we could better understand what to showcase and represent from our images.

Coding: For me personally, formatting the code proved to be very typical at first. I still wasn’t very used to using CSS so I decided that once and for all I would implement my skills of usage for the assignment. After trial and error, I felt that I was able to fully understand the problems that I had before especially for styling the buttons and I definitely feel way more confident in using CSS than I did before.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mwl323/week4/w04-exercise-JS-Conditionals/

For this exercise, I found it to be quite challenging at first but after implementing multiple techniques that I found online and tutorials as well as seeing the Learning Assistants for Comm Lab for the assignment, I found that I was able to establish a much better and stronger grasp on the topic.

I found the looping elements for the assignment to be quite different from what I was accustomed too cause I was used to coding for the fact that a click would lead me to another part and I didn’t need a button that would take me back. Because of this, I found javascript to be quite thorough and straight-forward so I thought that I was able to understand it a lot better. This assignment proved difficult because now there needed to be a return option. There was a film that I watched called “The Prestige” and it talks about how for a magic trick, there showing the audience your subject, making the subject disappear, and then making the subject come back and it state the the last part was the hardest part to do in a magic trick. This assignment reminded me of that since although I was able to create the images through html, make the image do its function through javascript, I wasn’t able to make the images come back and return since it was a hard task for me.

However, in the end, I found this assignment to be challenging in a good way and although it was a struggle, I believe that with more practice as I follow through with each class and recitation, I will be better at understanding looping and ultimately, as well as javascript.

For our project we plan on creating a narrative of the parallel experiences of two freshmen in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi and their adjustment to their new environment over the year. The images we chose to both illustrate and photograph are depictions of life in each setting, and messages between the characters and their family members will exemplify their feelings and experiences. The narrative will begin with a button to click to view admission letter and to enroll. Text messages and dialogue will occur between events to provide insight into the students’ thoughts and their interactions with people from home. Images will be interactive by scrolling or zooming, for example to give the illusion of walking into campus or looking for someone in the airport. Some panels will include a scrollable panorama of a landscape or city scape. Panels will emphasize cultural and language differences but also highlight the similarity in experiences of each place.

Below are some sketches that the illustrations of Abu Dhabi will be based on. We plan to finalize them in Adobe Illustrator and include photos of Shanghai.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mwl323/week3/emptyExample-intro-to-js/index.html

This assignment was definitely really challenging for me, but I found that when I was finished, I had already learned so much about coding and it was a great exercise for me. Although it was hinted on the slides to make the html and CSS first, I decided to just start with the html and JavaScript first instead. For some reason, despite learning CSS before JavaScript, I found that applying the JavaScript wasn’t too difficult and was rather pretty straightforward. Perhaps this was why during recitation on Thursday (despite having zero background in coding even though my brother is a computer science major and my father used to be a software engineer), I was able to follow through and understand what was going on for the first time in class when we learned about JavaScript. So for this assignment, creating the JavaScript was the least of my worries. I also felt like I had a much better understanding of html this time because I still remember how on the very first assignment, we were tasked to use html to create a personal portfolio. But this time around, the html part was the least of my worries for this assignment. However, I still had a lot of trouble with the CSS part just like I did for the last assignment. But after a lot of trial and error as well as getting help from the IMA Learning Assistants and using W3School, I was finally able to complete the assignment.