Trade show / Course Reflection (Week 13)

Our final week! In the end, my group and I were all quite happy with our final design and implementation. The website worked flawlessly except for one part that I couldn't figure out how to get the score to automatically be added to the database instead of manually entering it. Though this did not phase our tutor, who spoke very highly to us about the rest of the game but particularly the design. She loved it. So I think the trade show went fantastically.
The tutor was not the only person who enjoyed our site, I observed as other students in the class went and had a go at our 'Aussie Quiz' and had a few laughs, they seemed to be enjoying themselves and particularly liked having their name on the top 10 leader board!
After the trade show finished we had a few little bugs (trove images loading in wrong order) to fix before the final submission, which also included finalizing the report. Apart from that, we were done and dusted with DECO1800. Not really, still had to finish blogs and portfolios.

I found that this course gave me the most experience collaborating with group members on a project that I've ever had. We each used our strengths to help each-other complete parts of the assignment and it turned out perfectly. And we were fortunate in that regard, that each member had a particular field that they would prefer to specialize in, such as graphic design or javascript. I myself focused on SQL, PHP and databases, with a little bit of HTML. I considered myself to be quite weak in SQL and PHP at the start of this course but opted to work on those areas and let the other members do graphic design and HTML, so I could improve myself. I walk away from this course feeling more knowledgeable in that area and way more confident.



Week 12

This was just another normal week where we were working toward our final goal of a fully functional website. We decided to make a to-do list in order to better organise ourselves and check off tasks that needed to be completed, as we did them. This proved quite helpful as we knew who was working on what and it saved a lot of time during communication as we already knew what each person was working on.
We are also looking forward to next week when we have our final presentation and trade show, where everyone will be able to see the result of our hard work and dedication to this project.

At this point in the project I have been more than happy with my group members and the progress we have made as a team toward our final goal. I do believe that my team agrees with that statement, they feel the same way about the project as I do.

Experience with Digital Prototype and User Test (Week 11)

This week we presented our digital prototype to the class. There are still a number of things to do. My leader board does not display the top 10 scores and it also needs to be linked with the score from the actual game, which is still being worked on. 1 point needs to be added to the score tally when the correct answer only is chosen, right now its adding a point for every answer. Also, trove images need to be implemented still on the questions page.
Users filled out a questionnaire for us giving more feedback about the website. We had some helpful advice, such as increasing the difficulty of questions or allowing a certain difficulty to be chosen at the start of the game.k

Overall I felt really please with our prototype because we received a number of positive and encouraging comments from our peers and tutors alike. I felt like we were on the right track to a great quiz game and it was nearly within our reach, only two more weeks until our final presentation at the trade show.

From now our plan is to polish up the core features of the website and then potentially focus on adding more features like the suggested difficulty level of questions.

Week 10

In this particular week I came to class and found that the tutor had decided to play music from the speakers in the class room. The mood was a lot more laid back and as a team we didn't really have much constructive work being done. Mostly conversation about what we did over the mid semester break. But we did get eachother up to date with what work we had completed in the time we had been apart. Over the break we managed to finalise most of our website design and all the pages were functioning correctly, no broken links or anything were found upon inspection. I felt really pleased with my groups progress, as we seemed to be on track and had more of a vision for our final product compared with what I had seen with some other groups. But I didn't let this distract us, I made sure each team member continued working on their assigned parts so we didn't get behind as the project deadline was looming ever so close over our heads. It would have been a big problem if we left everything so late that it clashed with exam study and other due work in the coming weeks, so better to get most of it out of the way now. In the contact we worked out some bugs interfering with our UI and that was about it.

Week 9

We presented our current progress with the project in this contact session. We encountered some problems as we struggled to understand some fundamental javascript concepts and were unable to make our quiz somewhat functional, hopefully this is solved after the break. I on the other hand was struggling a bit with SQL and had to do some research into how to pull data from the database and display it on the page. I asked my tutor in the workshop about this and he fixed my issue in a matter of seconds, I was a bit taken aback when I saw how easily my issue was fixed.
Some of my team members worked on our progress report this week and I believe they finished it in a day, it was very good.
All my group members promised to try hard over the break to catch up on some parts that we were lagging behind in, in order to be more organised and making our life with this project easier. Lets see what happens when I come back in a few weeks.

Week 8

This week I used my workup session to quiz my tutor a bit more about phpmyadmin. This is the section of our quiz game that i will be working on, the database for the leaderboard. I have created the database itself and have all the different categories set up for it, such as the name of a user, score of the user, and time date the quiz was taken. I am yet to figure out how i will link the leaderboard with the quiz itself, i will surely have to discuss with the rest of my team later this week how we are going to do that. I think it would probably be better to work that out though once the core game has been completed.

In the contact session we had to sit through all the other groups progress reports, showcasing their quiz and its features. We also had to do a short presentation to the tutor only as we had run out of time and the tutors split up to cover more groups at the same time.

Experience with Paper Prototyping (Week 7)

This week in the contact session we had to give peer to peer feedback to other groups and also receive some feedback too! With the use of paper prototypes, created by David Fell for our website, I explained to other people in the class and showed them how our quiz game would be working. They were then given an online google form to fill out and provide us with feedback. The feedback we received was mostly positive, as the only complaints we go were saying the game itself was 'too simple' and this indicated to us that we should possibly add some more challenging elements to the game. 
After showing a tutor our paper prototypes, they especially liked our design and colour scheme elements of the website. He then told us that he thought our Trove element was shoehorned in, and thought we should make it more of a defining element of our quiz. This gave us some food for thought and we then discussed as a group about how we should be making trove more of a BIG thing in our quiz.

Week 6

We are at the stage in the project where we really have figured out what we want do to with our quiz game. The quiz will be based around Australian history and have a set list of questions posed to the user. The user will have a time limit to answer as many of these questions correctly as possible. Time will be added for each correct answer and the final score will be determined by how many questions were answered correctly. The trove implementation part comes in at the end of the quiz, where data will be pulled from trove relating to the question asked. This will give the user more information about a question they answered correctly/incorrectly and hopefully teach them something new about that topic.

In the contact we talked about where we should be heading now and decided it would be best complete our mockups/wireframes for next week, while also continuing our work on the main structure of the website. I believe that we are progressing well with the overall project and i'm happy with my teams effort toward it.

In my workshop i got the tutor to show me some tips and tricks in myphpadmin which removed some uncertainty that i had about it. Hopefully this will enable me to help our team with this part of our project more.

Poster and Pitch Reflections (Week 5)

This week in my workshop session we were taught about filezilla. This software is an important part of our assessment for this semester, as it is where we will be hosting all the files for our website. All of our group members are able to add files to the linux server using this software.

In the contact class, we will be giving a short 3 minute presentation on our concept, to our peers. For the presentation we will explain what the concept is all about, giving them a brief idea of it. We prepared two different mockup posters for this presentation, but we decided to go with the latter. The poster I made was quite easy to make since I am experienced enough in photoshop to be able to create them quickly and efficiently. Here are the two posters our group created.





Week 4

This weeks contact session required us to bring in 5 different ideas as a group to discuss in regard to our group project. We spent the class brainstorming about these ideas and picking things from each that we liked and adding them into one good idea. We finally decided that we would be making a quiz application which focused on Australian history.

Later in the week I established this concept for the quiz app:
This general knowledge quiz would be designed specifically for trivia enthusiasts. Particularly those from ages 15-30 years old. And of course, each question will focus on Australian history. Players will be required to answer as any questions as possible within a given time. When a question is answered correctly, time is added to the clock. Difficulty level is enforced by different starting time limits. When the time reaches 0 seconds, the amount of questions answered correctly will be counted and your score will be added to a leaderboard where you will e prompted to enter your name.

I also began working on a logo for our group in the workshop session this week, since I am well ahead in regard to photoshop skill than wha tis being taught at the moment. I thought I would spend my time doing something much more productive.

Team Work Module (Week 3)

This week we formed groups in our contact. At first I wanted to do a specific topic that one group was doing, but there was a limit on how many group members were allowed in each group. I had to go with another group, who were doing a quiz and i wasn't too fond of that. I later got used to the idea and was happy with my team as they were all nice blokes who got along well. Though I was also still a bit sceptical of their programming ability and knowledge, as they were only completing subjects like INFS1200 and CSSE1001 now, and i had done that last semester as an introduction to the harder courses such as DECO1800.

In the workshop I had to complete an online teamwork module, which I thought would be somewhat, but I have already covered most of the stuff in some of my other subjects which involved teamwork. I don't think I took in any new information from this and it was a bit of a waste of my time. I talked to my team mates about their experience with the teamwork module and they found it useful to them, so I suppose it was worth it in the long run because now we will all be thinking the same when it comes to team work.

Week 2

Today I had both my first DECO1800 contact class and workshop. Starting the day firstly with the workshop, it gave me the opportunity to recall skills I had learnt last semester in DECO1400 and meet a few of my class mates. We were briefed on what our assignment would be and shown the Trove API, which I found to be quite useful and interesting. This is a photo of some of the pages I was working on during the class.

Fast forward to the afternoon, this is when I had my contact lesson. We started off by doing some 'ice-breaking' activities, which involved the students moving to a specific side of the room to answer a question posed by the tutors. It helped us all to get to know a little bit about people in the room. After that we each sat at a table, and after introducing ourselves we began brainstorming ideas for the project. Here is an image of our notes involving the project and Trove. 

Course Expectations (Week 1)

Throughout the duration of this course i expect to be working together in teams with other students of different backgrounds, each with their own individual skills and knowledge. Together we will be learning more of these skills to create solutions for the problems which we will no doubt come across.

I wish to be able to learn a lot more about various aspects of web design, particularly javascript and api's, and how these can be used to create a positive experience for users of the website.

I hope that I will end up with a team that has similar interests as myself, and that we all get along well. This will help to better the time it takes in completing work and also the end product. Team work is the crucial key to success in these types of subjects.

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