Hi! I'm Becca

In this class, I'm working in a small team to design solutions for hospice workers and other people who work in end of life care. In the first phase, we've interviewed eight people so far to learn about their experience and what they struggle with. Talking to these people has been a deeply interesting experience and I've learned so much already about human centered design.

In principes of integrated engineering, I worked in a team of four to create an interactive animatronic octopus. I was the primary person doing electrical and software work, which involved designing and setting up the system of eleven servo motors and an IR distance sensor controlled by an Arduino. I then wrote the code that controlled the servos in a way that produced fluid and interesting movement, and reacted to sensor input.

Learn more and the final product here.

Over the summer, I worked with Olin's OCCAM Lab on Clew, an app for indoor navigation for blind and visually impaired people.

I focused reducing mapping error by integrating multiple data sources. We took odometry and Google Cloud Anchor data from multiple mapping sessions, and used graph optimization to create a more accurate map.

Most of my work was done in Python, but I also became proficient in Swift and learned a lot about accessible design.

Two Olin teams working senior capstone projects hired me to do the more specialized web and development that they didn't have the skills to do.

One was the Flybox team who were building an environment for fruit fly circadian rhythm experiments. I implemented their design for a web app where researchers could schedule the box to run different lighting conditions across multiday experiments. You can see the product here.

The other was Kite, building an app for financial education. I integrated Alpaca, built their user management and login systems, and helped with various small projects.

While in high school I interned for and was mentored by a small startup for eight months. I worked mostly with React, and learned the basics of full stack web development with Mongo, Express, and Node

I started with small bug fixes, and as I learned I was given bigger projects to work on, and more freedom to make design and architecture decisions. I was taught how to write quality code, accept feedback through code reviews, make time estimates, use git, and work within a larger project.

For an open ended class project, I used OpenCV to create a program that would detect solutions in the card game Set, by first locating cards in the picture then determining the color, shape and infill of each.

In that class, I also used the spotify API to analyze a group of playlists using NumPy.

Now, I'm a Course Assistant for this class, and I've really enjoyed helping students and teaching what I've learned about the software design process and mindset.

As in independent project while I was in high school, I built a redesigned app for my school's student information system. I got feedback from my peers,teachers, and administrators to design the app, and implemented it using React Native.

After building the frontend app, I worked with a mentor to try to expand the scope of the project. I brought in a couple of classmates to help with coding, and reached out to school district administration and my mentor's contacts to make a plan to eventually create a full system for my district. While this didn't lead anywhere, I learned a lot through this process.