Day 7: Early Intervention. Lean Development Process and Runestone Academy Workshop

        It is Monday, again, and I am pleased to report on my adjustment to the routine, which I talked about on Day 2. I have always been in awe of people for whom it is natural and easy to wake up early in the morning, for some, having only slept 5-6 hours. This was never the case for me. I always had a hard time waking up early and needed at least 8-9 hours of sleep. In retrospect, I believe that since I was a kid I have been involved in all sorts of non-routine activities, from dog handling to volunteering on different projects, that prevented me from learning about proper commitment to a sleep schedule. And while this non-stable regime worked all throughout high school, it definitely affected my college career, especially, in the beginning. I learned to pay close attention to my physical and mental needs, studied about sleep from a point of view of neurobiology, and accepted that my brain may simply need more time to recover than some of my friends' 5-6 clockworks. Today I woke up on time, picked up a breakfast box, set up my screens on the second floor of the hall, and was ready for the meeting. This summer experience has shown that I have done my homework and ready for a commitment to a routine when necessary.
        Dr. Jan asked all of the teams for a briefing on keep/delete/change first thing in the morning. Rebekah, our team leader, mentioned that she may want to visit our team last since we do not have as many issues. I felt a slight relief. When Dr. Jan did visit our group, we all realized that we had some major issues, in fact, maybe even more and bigger than the other groups. First and the biggest problem was that we were not using the Lean Development Process in an intended way by prioritizing less important tasks. Dr. Jan explained that the key is to think about the class ahead - the students who will be using the book. A slight change in a title or GUI is not of importance, when the datasets, the core of the book, are not yet found, cleaned, and implemented. She instructed me, a research student of the group, to focus on analyzing the dataset, World Happiness Rankings, and to then find a similar dataset with a Business-oriented context. Dr. Jan highlighted some of the key ideas of the Lean Development Process, however, the subject still feels a bit obscure. This is a great area to explore during my personal research hours.
        I spent the rest of the day focusing on Kaggle.com, perusing all of the available datasets that could resemble the World Happiness Ranking. I came to the conclusion that WHR dataset is the final version of what the datasets on Kaggle intend to become - they are raw and need processing. After studying about 500 different datasets, I found many that met the criteria of (1) having Business context but failed in (2) even slightly resembling the WHR dataset in their attribute columns.
        For the last hour of the day, all Runestone contributors at Berea were invited to attend the Runestone workshop, during which Brad Miller, the founder of the platform, and Barbara Erickson of the University of Michigan introduced their brand new widget - Assignments. Assignments allow professors to change exercises in books without having to rewrite the front end code. I am not yet confident about the implementation of the new widget into our books, however, we will be covering this idea on Wednesday. Overall, It was exciting to be invited to a conference with so many professors from all over the world.

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