Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program

The Girls Who Code Summer Immersion program is a 7 week coding intensive hosted at companies around the country. I was one of twenty students selected to participate in the program at AT&T regional headquarters in Atlanta, GA the summer before my Senior year in high school. Over the 7 weeks, I programmed in Scratch, Arduino, Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flask.

One of the first projects we worked on in Arduino was to build a robot utilizing an Arduino Uno and whiskers. The program itself would sense when a whister was touched, and would cause the robot to move in the opposite direction.

This program utilized the same Arduino Uno and robot structure. However, the movements of the robot was choreographed to a song of choice.

This program, written in Python, takes any image and changes the RGB ratio in order to make it look like the iconic "Obamicon".

This bouncing ball was programmed in Python utilizing Pygame in particular. The ball will bounce all around the screen's edges. The program can drag the ball, go in a certain pattern, or go in a random pattern.

The city scroller contains a city background that will move along as if the user is in a moving vehicle. This program was written in Python and utilized Pygame.

The runner game uses the city scroller as a background and has objects on the track which the avatar has to avoid by using the space bar on the keyboard.

The snow animation will allow for a random pattern of random sizes of 'snow' to fall down the screen at a random rate.

This program - written in scratch - is similar to the game Brick Breaker.

This game is a virtual game of the basketball game PIG utilizing a dice as a random number generator, and written in Scratch.

Each of the songs in this 'jukebox' were created in Scratch, as well as the acutal jukebox. The jukebox has the ability to play pause, clear the list, add to the end of the list, or add to the beginning.

• Date: June 2016 - July 2016

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Girls Who Code Final Project

After the first 5 weeks of the Summer Immersion Program, we had the opportunity to create a final project of our choice.

My final project was a program titled Twitcher. The program utilizes Python to pull from the Twiter API and parse through data from users. After the user enters a twitter handle into the box, the program uses Regular Expressions to parse through the Twitter data pulled from the API and find certain keywords specified in each filter. Twitcher was built into a web framework utilizing the microframework Flask. The website utilizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• Date: January 2017
• Client: Explore
• Category: Graphic Design

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senseSack

A Wearable SleepSack Containing Wireless Sensors for Monitoring Infant Body Vitals

The goal of this project was to design a device to monitor infants for the early symptoms of infant death, i.e. body temperature, humidity and skin color changes. The use of wearable technology is advantageous due to light-weight properties, lack of heat build-up, and durability. The device would be made with wearable circuits, making them less prone to irritation, excessive heat, etc.

In 2015, there were 3700 Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUID) in the United States among infants less than 1 year old. The three most common SUID include SIDS, unknown cause, and accidental suffocation or strangulation in bed. Though there have been inconclusive studies as to why this happens, there have been successful research studies that have proven symptoms such as changes in body temperature, fluctuations in blood pressure, and shifts in heart rate occur before the child dies. Research has determined some of the risk factors that increase a child’s probability of SUID or SIDS since a majority of the infant deaths are attributed to unsafe sleep practices and environments. For example, bed sharing, loose bedding, wedging and entrapment, and an environment that promote infant over heating are considered unsafe sleep practices. The “Back to Sleep” campaign, now called the “Safe to Sleep” campaign, was introduced in the 1994, to reduce possibility of strangulation or suffocation. There has been approximately a 50% reduction in deaths since the introduction of the campaign, but SIDS remain the leading cause of post-neonatal mortality.

In the past, teams have developed wearable technologies for monitoring children. However, current technologies are not targeted at sensing symptoms of SIDS or SUID, but simply monitoring the heart rate of a child. The senseSack was designed completely from individual components. This includes both the hardware and software portions of the project as well as the electronic and non-electronic components.

The design of the senseSack is simple and effective. Each wearable sensor, designed for human contact, collects data. They then communicate with the mobile device due to the Bluetooth chip in the circuit. While designing the senseSack, temperature tests were taken to measure the accuracy of the sack with heat retention. Not only was the senseSack able to measure the decrease in temperature, but also the temperature inside the sack. Thus, it was concluded the senseSack would be able to accurately measure a drop in temperature.

The senseSack is a cost effective and seemingly simple idea with the potential to reduce the probability of a child having SIDS or SUID. One of the device's purposes is to use the senseSack as a predictive analytics model in hospitals and/or homes. This sleepsack will enable early warning of health hazards giving guardians greater peace of mind and users greater comfort in knowing the reliability of the product.

The current design of the product leaves room for potential improvements. One of those and one of the easiest, is adding more sensors to the product. The multiplexer is in place to continue expanding upon the product. An app for the product would be fully developed to ensure ease of use for individuals.

The hardware for the project was put together by myself utilizing components purchased from adafruit.com or sparkfun.com. The software was programmed by myself in Arduino.

• Date: November 2016 - January 2017
• Patent Pending

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