DMP-2025 Week 07 update by Justin Charles (#412)

Signed-off-by: justin212407 <[email protected]>

Author: justin212407

src/constants/MarkdownFiles/posts/2025-07-20-dmp-25-justin212407-week07.md

@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+---
+title: "DMP’25 Week 07 Update by Justin Charles"
+excerpt: "Implemented tower-level dragging in the workspace, enabling grouped brick movement and refining state synchronization across collisions"
+category: "DEVELOPER NEWS"
+date: "2025-07-20"
+slug: "2025-07-20-dmp-25-justin212407-week07"
+author: "@/constants/MarkdownFiles/authors/justin-charles.md"
+tags: "dmp25,sugarlabs,week7,justin212407"
+image: "assets/Images/c4gt_DMP.webp"
+---
+
+<!-- markdownlint-disable -->
+
+# Week 7 Progress Report by Justin Charles
+
+**Project:** Music Blocks 4 Masonry  
+**Mentors:** [Anindya Kundu](https://github.com/meganindya/), [Sumit Srivastava](https://github.com/sum2it)  
+**Assisting Mentors:** [Devin Ulibari](https://github.com/pikurasa/), [Walter Bender](https://github.com/walterbender)  
+**Reporting Period:** 2025-07-12 - 2025-07-20   
+
+---
+
+## Goals for This Week
+
+- Implement tower-level dragging for grouped bricks in the workspace  
+- Ensure consistent updates to brick positions during drag  
+- Synchronize tower state with collision maps in real-time  
+
+---
+
+## This Week’s Highlights
+
+### 1. **Tower Dragging Implementation**
+
+Worked on [PR #450](https://github.com/sugarlabs/musicblocks-v4/pull/450) to add tower-level dragging:
+- Enabled movement of entire towers (root brick + children) as a single unit  
+- Preserved parent-child hierarchy when updating positions  
+- Improved drag responsiveness by recalculating bounding boxes during movement  
+
+### 2. **State Synchronization Across Towers**
+
+- Updated `TowerModel` to handle bulk position updates for all bricks within a tower  
+- Integrated with collision maps so towers temporarily unregister during drag and re-register on drop  
+- Enhanced React state management for smoother rendering of large tower movements  
+
+### 3. **User Interaction Improvements**
+
+- Introduced proper offset handling to keep drag anchor consistent regardless of tower size  
+- Added visual feedback for tower movement, ensuring alignment with cursor  
+- Prepared groundwork for snapping logic to align towers when dropped near others  
+
+---
+
+## Challenges & Solutions
+
+**Challenge:** Dragging large towers caused lag due to repeated state updates  
+**Solution:** Batched updates at the tower level and minimized per-brick re-renders  
+
+**Challenge:** Maintaining relative brick positions while dragging  
+**Solution:** Used stored subtree offsets to apply uniform translation during movement  
+
+---
+
+## Key Learnings
+
+- **Tower-Level Abstractions**  
+  Learned how to extend single-brick drag logic to tower hierarchies without breaking child alignment  
+
+- **Batching Updates**  
+  Saw the importance of batching atom updates in Recoil to avoid UI jank in React  
+
+- **Collision Integration**  
+  Understood how temporary removal from collision maps avoids false positives during active drag  
+
+---
+
+## Next Week’s Roadmap
+
+- Implement snapping between towers using collision hints  
+- Add shadow previews during drag for better visual guidance  
+- Begin refining detach/attach logic for bricks when splitting or merging towers  
+
+---
+
+## Resources & References
+
+- [musicblocks-v4 PR #450](https://github.com/sugarlabs/musicblocks-v4/pull/450)  
+- [musicblocks-v4 Repository](https://github.com/sugarlabs/musicblocks-v4)  
+---
+
+## Acknowledgments
+
+Thanks to my mentors for guiding me through scaling drag logic from bricks to full towers.