University Projects
Forest Health Project
This assignment was for the Software Engineering Fundamentals course. It was a group work assignment that required effective communication and planning between team members. This assignment began in August and was due in late October. In our Executive Summary, we described the background as follows:
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"The Forest Health project was formed to monitor and evaluate the impacts of bushfires on Australian native forests and their post-fire recovery. One of the mechanisms they wish to pursue is establishing a software system for citizen scientists to provide data from any fire-affected area across Australia, for Forest Health researchers to analyse.
In August 2022, the Forest Health Project issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to produce a prototype user interface (UI) for a mobile application to allow citizen scientists to collect data while in the field.
Griffith University responded to the RFP and has been selected to deliver a prototype user interface for a citizen science bushfire impact data collection application on Apple iOS to the Forest Health project."
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Each of the following four roles had to be fulfilled by at least one team member:
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Project Manager
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Requirements Analyst
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Prototype Developer
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Software Tester
After a discussion with my teammate, we decided to play to our strengths. I was the Project Manager and the Software Tester. I also assisted with the requirements and some of the prototype development. However, my teammate did most of the prototype development as that was his area of interest.
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As the Project Manager, I drafted a schedule for work and meetings. One of my key takeaways from this assignment is that I need to include buffer time in the project to ensure a smoother delivery. I also found it useful to have short standup-type meetings once a week during the beginning of the assignment and more frequently as due dates approached. I appreciated my teammate's approachability and hard work on this assignment. It made a big assignment easier to have a teammate willing to answer questions and provide direction whenever I was stuck. We completed the assignment completely over Microsoft Teams and have never met face-to-face.
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Our final report was eighty-seven pages long and received a high grade.
Does the Population Density Vary with Island Appeal?
I chose Applied Data Science as one of my electives. It was the follow-on course for Statistics. I thought that I had not learned enough about statistics to be able to confidently apply for positions as a Data Scientist at the end of my degree, so I used one of my few electives to do the Applied Data Science course. I was glad I chose that course because I felt I better understood statistics after taking it. I also came away with the understanding that statistics is a subject you could spend a lifetime studying and never get bored due to its broad applications.
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The assignment that I have chosen to highlight was the final assignment for this course. I decided on the Island Settlements dataset to answer:
“Does the population density vary with island appeal?”
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The method used was a comparison of one-way ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric test.
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In case you are wondering… my results provided sufficient evidence to conclude that population density varies with island appeal for the Island Settlements dataset.
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I chose this assignment because it shows skill in programming with R, and I am looking forward to seeing if I have the opportunity to use R in my career. I learned that there are many online and textbook resources for learning R. I found that well-commented scripts, a methodical approach and logic-checking the results provide the best results.
