Inspiration:
The briefs have just been announced, and we are all having headblock. I am watching the news with my grandfather, and a special program comes up for those who are affected by war and COVID. I am forced to think of all their children; glowing diamonds tarnished with mud and blood. I think of how they cannot get higher education because they cannot reach even a calculator. An idea strikes me. We are going to make a graphing calculator. We are going to let the children who are in remote places get one of these on a $6 computer, and graph away, rather than buy an expensive internet connection or an even more expensive graphing calculator. We will provide these children in war-torn cities, where a network signal is precious and graphing calculators are non-existent or at least unbelievably hard to obtain. My Counterpart in a remote village in India or Africa, or a war-torn province in the Middle East, should be allowed access to education, and nothing should stand in his way, be it terrorists, soldiers, or poverty.
What it does:
This program uses Python and used the Matplotlib library to get the coefficients of a polynomial and plot it. It requires a GUI, although the input window is still text-based.
How I built it:
The program itself was difficult to build, and eventually I had to fall back to asking the user to enter the coefficients of the polynomial. However, this was also extremely fun to build. I used the logic of solving the equation algebraically. ## What’s next? There are multiple options for us from here. We intend that this program can be later ported over to a cheap SBC that can then run our project. Our next steps are to provide an interface with Tkinter or PyQt, integrate that window with the window plotting the graph, and adapt this interface to devices with mobile-like aspect ratios. These are all improvements that we will make once we are ready to move forward. We will improve upon the equation-parsing part so that there is no longer any need to ask the user to enter coefficients alone. I have also started a TUI, but unfortunately my team-mate did not take it from there.
Final reflections:
I have learnt a lot from this experience, and I have really enjoyed it. I have experimented with a lot of new data structures and new concepts, even in subjects unrelated to coding (I read up on summation notation and wrote a function like summation notation). Overall, I loved this opportunity and would love to do this again. However, I found a disconnect between me and my team-mate. She barely wrote useful code, and the submission’s logic is entirely mine.
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