We are very excited to share that we have begun our second semester of work on BridgingRoots after a semester-long hiatus where we focused on our courses! There are several exciting updates such as the addition of a new team member, Tom Jing, a final-year Computer Science student at UVIC to fill in for Isla and Preet who are continuing their journey to completing their courses this semester.
The other exciting news is our upcoming trip to Tuktoyaktuk at the end of the month! The team has spent the past two weeks freshening up on UI/UX design and testing principles, creating lists of questions, and designing user studies to bring to the Mangilaluk School. The excitement and motivation are very high as the team is going to experience the community that they have been hearing/learning about for the past 8 months in person. In addition, they will finally meet the students they worked with who did not have the chance to come down for the final conference in December. The students share in the team’s excitement! Thankfully, even though the team will not experience the beautiful Northern Lights the youth of Tuktoyaktuk always shared pictures of due to the Midnight sun, they had the opportunity to see them in Victoria this weekend!
On the technical side, the team has been migrating to a new framework as the current one has shown to have scalability, content-pulling and stability issues. The team has picked up another new-to-them framework, React, and is almost done recreating the existing UI. The similarities and the simplicity of React allowed for quick development time which leaves the team hopeful. In addition, the new design prototypes look very promising and the team is eager to share them with the Tuk community at the end of the month. The working space in the office underwent a glow-up and now allows the developers to have multiple monitors and easier communication with each other. Debugging has become a team effort. Overall, this has been an optimistic and productive start to the term and we hope to continue with such spirits to have a fully-functioning product by September 1.
