Summer of Code/Tarun Kumar Singhal
About Me
What is your name? My Name is Tarun Kumar Singhal.
What is your email address? My personal email address is tarunsinghaliitd@gmail.com and my university email address is tarun.singhal@mail.utoronto.com
What is your Sugar Labs wiki username? Tarun Singhal
What is your IRC nickname on irc.freenode.net? My IRC nickname on irc.freenode.net is tarunsinghal92
What is your first language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.) My first languages are English and Hindi. My language of communication is English.
Where are, you located, and what hours (UTC) do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.) I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The time zone is Eastern Time Zone (UTC - 5). I tend to work in evening till late night. It makes it 3 pm to 1 am (UTC), but it is adjustable. I will try to be active with mentors on IRC chat and emails.
Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in opensource. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer? I have worked on various open source projects which are available on my Github repository (https://github.com/tarunsinghal92/). There are mostly related to the application of Civil engineering in Computer science along with some projects that are related to WebGL. But apart from that, I haven’t contributed to any existing open source projects but I always wanted to. I think with Sugar labs, it will a great opportunity for me to learn and contribute in open source. Becoming a part of a community, which involves several people working together in a coordinated fashion, would help me to learn and contribute more in open source projects.
About My project
We are looking for projects that will enhance the Sugar Learning Platform. Please consider how your project will have impact on children learning. What is the name of your project? Sugarizer backend Dashboard
Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using? The goal of the project is to create the "Sugarizer Server Dashboard" for teachers and deployment admin which can be used to control and manage the work of learners and manage and analyze all activity on a Sugarizer Server. This would increase user engagement from both learner and teacher side. It can be explained through a lot of use cases. Here are few of them:
1. Today, leaners give the result of their works (a drawing, a text, a video, ...) to the teacher in USB drives which is quite inefficient. With the Sugarizer Dashboard, the teacher can access all submitted Journals directly from dashboard and would be able to launch each activity exactly as it was on the learner’s device.
2. To analyze usages on a deployment, it's important to know which activities are used and how often they are used. With the dashboard, the admin could view detailed statistics on activities usage and adapt content to the field. Currently, it is being done by backing up each laptop individually but it this process can be hugely automated through the dashboard.
3. To supervise a deployment, admins need to know the exact memory and storage on devices and on the server. With Sugarizer Server Dashboard, admins could retrieve stats on storage usage for all devices and adapt the infrastructure accordingly. We will try to explain this by the means of a flow chart. As we can see, there are three types of users: Leaners, Teachers & Admin. The learners would work on different activities and store their data on XO server. On the other hand, Learners would use the dashboard to access and view learner’s activities. Admin would be interested every possible information. Sugarizer APIs would act as a data source for the dashboard.
The final Sugarizer Dashboard is expected to have the following features:
• Users: how many users has been registered on the server, how many users currently connected,
top users on the server, last user’s connection, create/edit/remove a user.
• Journal: how many Journals and how many entries in Journal on the server, last Journal, and last
entries, the size of Journals, top Journals, edit a journal (see/update/remove) entries.
• Application: how many applications are available on the server, change application visibility from
Client, update order and way to appear in the favorite view.
• Graphic and request: display graphics and report on previous data.
To implement the dashboard, we would be enhancing the existing Sugarizer Server API and would
also be integrating an authentication mechanism. For the same purpose, we need to four new fields
to the user’s route as mentioned below:
• Email: This would act as a medium for the user to receive their dashboard password and act
as the user ID while logging in the dashboard. Not required for Learners but would be a
required field for Admins and teachers.
• Type: This would be used to distinguish between the student, admin or learner. Role
segregation is defined as follows:
o Student: Can’t access the dashboard, will work on XO only.
o Teacher: Can access dashboard, but cannot access the general memory and storage
stats.
o Admin: Can access everything.
• Password: Encrypted Password of the user
• Timestamp: Last access timestamp of the dashboard. Valid only for admin & teachers.
{
"name": "Lionel",
"color": {
"stroke": "#A700FF",
"fill": "#FF8F00"
},
"favorites": [
"org.olpcfrance.PaintActivity",
"org.olpcfrance.TamTamMicro",
…
],
"language": "fr",
"private_journal": "56b271d026068d62059565e4",
"shared_journal": "536d30874326e55f2a22816f",
"_id": "56b271d026068d62059565e5",
"email": "john.doe@email.com", /*[NEW FIELD]*/
"type": "student", /*student or teacher or admin, [NEW FIELD] */
"password": "536dd30da874326e55f2a22816f", /*encrypted [NEW FIELD]*/
"timestamp": 1423341066909 /* last access timestamp [NEW FIELD]*/
}
Also, to store memory & storage stats, we need to create a log route in the API. Details are as follows: • Memory: Memory used in KB. • Storage: Storage used in KB. • Device Type: Whether activity was launched on Web or Mobile device. • User Id: To track down the user associated with this log. • Activity ID: Identifier for an activity. • Activity Name: just to give a quick idea about the activity. Though it can be removed as we can retrieve this data from activity id. • Launch Mode: From where the app was launched: Journal View | Home View | Neighbourhood View • Timestamp: Time when this log was generated.
{
"activity_id": "caa97e48-d33c-470a-99e9-495ff02afe01",
"activity": "org.sugarlabs.Markdown",
"user_id": "56b271d026068d62059565e5",
"device_type": "web | mobile",
"launch_mode": "journal | home | neighbourhood",
"usage":{
"memory" : 64, /* in KB */
"storage": 128 /* in KB */
},
"timestamp": 1423341066909
}
To develop the dashboard, we would be using NodeJs as a server, Express for routing, & EJS as the templating engine. Apart from these, JQuery, Highcharts.js, and SketchUI would also be used to design and make an interactive user interface with lots of analytics related to the activities and users. Most of the programming would in JS, HTML, and CSS. Following is a snapshot of the prototype which I have developed using the above-mentioned technologies as proof of concept during the application period.
What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is from midMay to mid-August; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (end of June); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.
Week Task
27 April-19 May Explore the technologies to be used in developing Sugarizer Dashboard. Talk to the mentors to decide how to integrate the existing API with the Dashboard and think about possible changes to existing API so that they both work seamlessly.
19 May – 25 May Begin coding for Sugarizer backend Dashboard and implement changes that are required for the API.
25 May – 2 June Complete the Basic framework for the Dashboard.
2 June – 9 June Implement authentication and user module of API on the Dashboard.
9 June – 16 June Implement activities and journal Module and test the workflow.
16 June – 23 June Implement main dashboard screen with all analytics required.
23 June – 3 July Midterm Evaluation
3 July – 31 July Complete the Remaining tasks and made modification from regular feedback.
31 July – 7 August Start the performance testing and enhancement and fix any existing bugs.
7 August – 14 August Buffer week
14 August - 21 August Polish up the UI, and review the documentation.
21 August – 28 August Final Evaluations
Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.
I completed my Bachelor’s from Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi, India and am currently a Master’s student at the University of Toronto in Toronto, ON, Canada. Being a part of such prestigious institutes famous for their strong competitive environment, I have excellent skills to manage time and deliver quality work within the prescribed deadline.
Technology always fascinates me and gives me immense happiness when I see that just by writing few of lines of code, we can make a great product and it can help a lot of people to become more active in their day to day life. A simple example of this is a course project that I have worked in my 2nd semester of Master’s program (https://github.com/tarunsinghal92/3d-modal-analysis) which is basically a simulation tool to analyze an N story building under different types of the earthquake. This program can certainly help civil engineers to simulate their design under earthquake and come up with even better design strategies. Following is a screenshot of this project that describes the stress distribution at a certain time step of an earthquake in 5 storey building. Prior to my master’s, I was working with a Start-up named VMock (https://www.vmock.com), where we were working on a product that can automatically scans a candidate’s resume and gives feedback using natural language processing and machine learning on how to improve it. As it was a very early stage company, all the deadlines were used to be very hard but we tried our best and were able to meet almost all possible deadlines. This has taught me an important lesson of working in deadline based competitive environment.
Apart from these, I have also made a small prototype for Sugarizer dashboard and some of the screenshots are as follows. It accessed using following link: http://35.167.50.63:8100/journals. Dashboard screen was created using SketchUI and different analytics were shown on the front page to give an overall idea of the activities usage (Dashboard not present in prototype). Following is the screen for activities page and it is also available in the prototype. This prototype demonstrates my skills and capabilities required to complete the project in a systematic manner. The code for the prototype can be found on Github: https://github.com/tarunsinghal92/sugarizer-backend
Me and the community
If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.
- Tarun
The project aims to create a "Sugarizer Server Dashboard" for teachers and deployment admin which can be used to control and manage the work of learners and analyze all various activities on a Sugarizer Server. Teachers won’t have to locally transfer journals from the learners’ device and would be able to launch each activity exactly like it was on the learner’s device. This project would have great impact on the teachers as they would be able to manage their workflow in a more automated way which would also increase user engagement & product adoption by completing the loop which is missing right now. For the sugar labs community, it would be a great as they could view all the statistics directly from the dashboard and work on improving the system in a fact-based way using the information presented in the dashboard.
- Lionel Laske´
Sugarizer has started this year its first deployment on the field. We learned that deploying a pedagogical tool in a classroom can't be efficient if not mix with teacher tools. The Sugarizer Server Dashboard will allow teachers and deployment administrators to retrieve data and statistics and then to optimize Sugarizer deployment. It's a major item to favorise Sugarizer adoption in the classroom.
- Michael Ohayon
The Sugarizer Dashboard is a new project to monitor and take actions for Sugarizer deployments. It will allow teachers to get feedback on the most used activities, read journal entries and manage users. The deployment team will get usage statistics and administration functionalities. This project is a major improvement for Sugarizer, it will allow to measure Sugarizer's usage and take useful decisions on future enhancements.
What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around? If I get stuck somewhere in the project, then the first strategy would be to get whatever help I can get from Google, Stack overflow etc. This should cover most the technology related issues. But in case, I got stuck in figuring out what should I do next then I would immediately contact my project mentors and community and seek their help using IRC and mailing list.
How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project? Initially, I was thinking of writing a separate blog, but generally, they got lost after few years. So, I am planning to write an update blog on my project’s Github account so that it would be easy for me and for my mentors to keep track of the project and these updates would always be there with the code base so it would be easy to track even after a long time. Moreover, this would also help other developers to add additional functionalities in future.
Apart from that I would be regularly hosting all the changes on my private server so that it becomes easy for the community to view and suggest possible feedback on it. For problems and questions, I would contact my mentor and the community on IRC and mailing list.
Miscellaneous
We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts. Please do one of the following: Send us a link to a screenshot of your Sugar development environment with the following modification: when you hover over the XO-person icon in the middle of Home view, the drop-down text should have your email in place of "logout". This modification was made by changing the Language(EN) corresponding to Shutdown variable in the locale.ini file. Describe a great learning experience you had as a child. “Work hard and don’t worry about the outcome because if you have done enough then it is going to be alright. Failure and Success are mere the outcomes, what matters, in the end, is the journey you had for it. If there are instances, which makes you feel that something is wrong then it needs to change and nobody else is going to come and do it for. It’s only you who could make it right.” I am not sure whether this belief is an outcome my childhood or undergrad or job experience but it keeps me motivated to do well in life. Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more? A series of events, starting with a minor degree in Computer Science (CS) during Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering (CE), publishing a research paper involving heavy computational component of ABAQUS, two years of tech start-up experience in VMock has created a desire in me to work on improving the lives of common people by integrating Computer Science (CS) and (CE). My Master’s was purely an outcome of this decision. I believe that having a good understanding of both the fields can help me to develop Civil engineering related open source projects. With Sugarizer dashboard project, I can certainly understand better about contributing to the open source community.