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Team:BU Wellesley Software/Notebook/MichelleNotebook
From 2011.igem.org
Michelle's Notebook
Contents |
June 3
Bootcamp
At bootcamp, we have learned tons of biology in a matter of days. As someone who hasn't taken biology in six years, I've had a hard time getting back into the mindset of learning biology as a subject, but I also remember much more than I expected to from my high school days. The central dogma was a huge part of my high school experience. I'm still adjusting to the idea that we can break into the central dogma—that we can alter DNA and change the DNA that will be created when the cell replicates, making more of the cells that were created by us. It's a step beyond what I've thought about before, and I still feel overwhelmed by what I don't understand.
June 10
Surface Training
This week, I've been learning the basics of the programming that I'll be doing this summer. I've never worked on the Microsoft Surface before, so I'll need a lot of practice before I can do any programming on my own. It helps that I'll likely be pair programming all summer; between two of us who have relatively little C# experience, we can probably figure out most of our problems (and I'm sure we'll have many).
Lab Notebook Background Observations
As a part of user-centered design, we need to figure out what functions the wetlab team will want from an electronic lab notebook. To do so, we have been observing the team working in the wetlab, as well as sitting in on their lab meetings. We hope that doing so will help us figure out what the team needs, and will help us design an application that is as useful as possible.
June 17
Lab Notebook Designs
This week, I've worked with Kathy to design some initial prototypes for what the electronic lab notebook might look like. So far, we have ideas for most of the main screens, but we haven't gone into too much detail. We're hoping to present these designs to the wetlab team next week and get some feedback from them.
Interview with George Church
I went with Orit and Kathy to an interview with George Church, where we asked what sorts of computational tools he used in his lab and what sort of tools he saw being useful for the future. While this might not be as relevant for the work we're doing now, it's essential in looking to the future of our work. We're trying to envision what will come next for the tools we're creating now, and that helps us figure out what the role is of the tool we're making now. If we're making a tool that won't change much over time, then we need to do more work now to ensure that it will continue to function in the future; if the tool we're making is a stepping stone to a much larger tool, then the algorithm and interaction issues are much more important than the actual implementation.
June 24
Lab Notebook Design Refinement
We presented our designs for the electronic lab notebook to the wetlab team this week, and they were very excited and eager to help us. While they worked in the lab, they came out to visit me and Kathy while they had down time between experiments. We explained our designs to them, then invited any feedback they had. This worked very well for us, because we got plenty of feedback from them, and working with smaller groups let us confirm trends: when all of the groups told us that they wanted a clear way to communicate the procedures that they had completed with their labmates, but didn't want it to intrude on their own work, we knew that was something we would have to incorporate. Some of the wetlab members (especially Alberto) even pulled out their own notebooks and started to draw what their ideal notebook would look like. That's exactly what we need to see: now we can make software that will fill all of his needs.
July 1
July 8
July 15
July 22
July 29
August 5
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