Connections Lab

For my final presentation I looked at creating a webpage that would be used to help people to understand the difficulty of having a disability that is as a result of pain from manual dexterity. The idea was to try to get people to experience what it is like to live with something like arthritis or to have limited finger movement.

How Difficult is it…..?

I set about building this webpage but as it developed I realized that my ambition was bigger than my abilities! I ran into all sorts of issues. The page would consist of several components.

  1. An explainer of what the experiment is.
  2. A list of items to gather and images of them.
  3. A set of instructions on what to do with the items.
  4. A video showing how to set up the experiment.
  5. A google form to fill out after completing the experiment.

While I had managed to do most of these things for the page it didn’t have features such as JSON and .js scripts which we had learned in the classes. I felt that I was not going to be able to find relevant JSON information on the subject to use and I was also struggling with some other issues on promises and calling the JSON data.

Pivoting to a new idea.

I decided to pivot to a new idea that was close to my other personal interests, adaptive mountain biking. I recently got back into the sport after a very long time! In fact last time I was on a mountain bike I ended up in a wheelchair! When I went back to the trails I couldnt believe that I could manage on some of them. After a while I was able to manage on nearly all of them local to me. I though that it would be cool to create a list of Adaptive usable trails so others who wanted to try adaptive MTBing could find out where they could do it.

I was able to create my own JSON file to pull information from about the trails that I was using. this contained three key pieces of information. 1. Location, 2. Name of the trail, 3. Difficulty of the trail. I was very motivated to create this webpage!

I created a JSON file with the information of my 6 favorite trails to begin with. Then I set about creating the HTML to create the page and the CSS and JS files to pull and display the data. I was about to go on a journey! I am not a coder and have very little skill in this area. I don’t know a lot about when errors occur or issues persist. When I tried to deploy the page it wouldn’t display the data. I kept getting problems based around something called CORS.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS/Errors

This was due to the browser. Even though I was using Google Chrome when I tried to run the code it wouldn’t work. I thought that it was my terrible coding and I spent hours combing through my code to find any issues! It turns out that it was because the Chrome sign in I used was my personal Google account and not my university one. Once I changed over to the university one it worked! Relief and rage at the same time!

Here is the link to my webpage on github. All the relevant files are there to view too.

https://github.com/NoelJoyce/Adaptive-MTB-Ireland

My experience has been difficult but enjoyable when I figured things out. Luckily expert tuition from my instructors has gotten me out of trouble too and is much appreciated. I learned that I need to be more aware of my limitations too and to build my projects based on that.