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Showing posts from April, 2025

CST 462s - Module 8

Week 8, This is a short week as most final weeks of CSUMB’s online courses are. However, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about my experience in Service Learning. I think for the most part, everything went well with my site. My site mentor was very helpful and kind and has many sources that can help one who wants to learn more and contribute. Something I would improve on is spending less time on a report that may not have enough information on reproducing a bug. I believe that the site is impactful as a whole, while what I have done individually in the last few weeks may not be immediately impactful, everyone working together to help improve LibreOffice can help make a difference in providing a powerful productive office suite that can become available to anyone with a computer. The software is available on many different operating systems, is free, and is open source because the The Document Foundation treats everyone as equals and believes everyone should be able to own ...

CST 462s - Module 7

Week 7, This week was more focused on adding the conclusion to our research paper which thankfully my team and I had more time for because we were caught up. While in the end, our research question was not fully answered in regard to how a lack of access to technology affects STEM engagement and academic success of underrepresented high school students from socioeconomically challenged communities, we did gain valuable information on other causes to the root problem in the question. The two main factors being the involvement of a mentor who already has experience in STEM, and a lack of availability and opportunity to gain experience in STEM-related activities. This is also where I started to finalize some documentation I made for my service-learning experience and correct some minor discrepancies.

CST 462s - Module 6

Week 6, This week is a bit more compact, however this is because we ended up getting our final survey responses a little bit late. We ended up having to go back and edit our survey questions both on the form itself and the research paper, as well as sending the form to another class. After that, we went over the responses and gained some interesting findings. There were a couple of themes found among the students. The students all felt they have the same level of access to technology to their peers, and they feel the school does encourage them to use technology and provides them with sufficient resources like laptops. However, they feel there are additional factors that may contribute to a student's success in STEM. One factor being a mentor or role model who already has experience in the STEM field. The final common theme found in the responses is the mention of there not being enough opportunities in extracurricular activities relating to STEM. As for the service learning, I have...

CST 462s Modules 4 & 5

Weeks 4 and 5, This journal entry is a combination of weeks 4 and 5 because both weeks are focused on conducting interviews\surveys for our research paper. However, despite the time we are given to obtain our data, we are falling behind on our responses. It would seem that the questions are a bit confusing to the students so we need to make our questions more clear.  The service learning is going well, and I’ve been introduced to binary bisecting (bibisecting). To summarize, I download a couple of older versions of LibreOffice, and using Git, I try and find which commit first introduced a bug, which can also be used to find regressions in LibreOffice. I then post my results in the related bug report. This is pretty interesting, and I can see how this would be a very powerful tool to use in future projects of my own.

CST 462s - Module 3

Week 3, This week we continue our service learning and research paper, which is going well so far. The service learning is more or less a continuation of last week, since we are reviewing bug reports and reproducing the bug. I believe I am starting to get the hang of it. For the research paper, we started working on our research design. This part involves how we are going to conduct our own research such as who the target participants are, what our methods and procedures are, and what questions we are going to ask. In our case, we will be using google forms to send out surveys to high school students in economically disadvantaged communities who want to participate in a STEM field.

CST 462s - Module 2

Week 2, This week is when we start putting in some work to our service learning and research paper. For the service learning, I was taught how to look for bug reports, and generally how long it takes to complete it. I have noticed there are some Linux users among the reports, and I tend to focus more on Windows. So, I started using a virtual machine to run Debian Linux so I can test more bug reports.  For the research paper, my team and I started looking at related academic sources that can help us get an idea of what to research for. As I said last week, our topic is focused on a high school student’s access to technology and how it affects their educational outcomes and STEM participation. What we found was interesting, and a common topic we found was the Digital Divide, which in short is the gap between different groups of people created by unequal access to modern technology. There are a good number of papers that discuss this, and this helped us develop our research question, ...

CST 462s - Module 1

Week 1, This is the first official week of the course Race Gender & Class in the Digital World. There are two tracks for this class, and I am placed in the first track, which involves us selecting a site to provide service for and learn from, as well as develop a research paper of our own topic. For the site I will be providing service to is The Document Foundation, where I will be supporting the Quality Assurance team by triaging bug reports related to the productive office suite software LibreOffice. In short, I will be looking for unconfirmed bugs, attempt to reproduce them, and if they are reproducible, I will set them as confirmed. Interestingly, the values of the organization are in favor of the general public, by seeing people as equals and advocates for free software and open source, which allows users of any group to have access to powerful software. As for the research paper, my group and I decided on a topic related to the relationship between a high school student's...