Our Team

For the project, we have organised ourselves into groups of 4 people to work together to deliver a web application that can demonstrate our skills with coding and access information from Trove. 

Following from the previous posts activities we were asked to choose an area that would interest us, whether it is was educational, puzzles, games or utilities. From there we formed groups based on what we thought would be a good project to work on. 

Our team came together as we all thought working on a maze would be a great project idea. Our group consists of Yifei Chen, Harrison Lucas, Blake Bodycote and myself. 

Next was our first decision as a team, what our name was going to be. The tutors asked for us to use a name selected from Greek Mythology, whether it was a god, monster or hero. As we were doing a maze I thought it was appropriate to base our name of a myth involving one.

Image from http://uploads5.wikiart.org/images/edward-burne-jones/theseus.jpg

From Ancient-Greece.org

"The sacrifices of the Athenians ended only when Theseus, son of Aegean ruler of Attica, traveled to Crete as part of the youths to be sacrificed, but once in the labyrinth he killed the Minotaur and managed to find his way out of the labyrinth with the aid of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos."

We have chosen Theseus to identify ourselves and this project will be our metaphorical Minotuar.

Contact: Week 3

Exercises in the Week 3 Contact class involved coming up with and expanding on ideas in which TROVE data can be used over a number of categories focusing on games, educational, utilities and puzzles.

By being split in to 4 groups, each group was initially asked to think of ideas based around one of the topics. After brainstorming, the groups were asked to moved to the next location and continue where the previous group had left off and start narrowing down how their ideas could become more precise.

Many interesting directions for the application of data sourced from TROVE started to come forward across all groups. Utilities had some great issues of the data in regards to natural disaster risk areas and location services.

Moving on from the brainstorming, students were asked to congregate around the topic that interested the most and ask themselves why and what direction would they like to go for the project. I had decided on working a puzzle application that involved a maze.

This seems like a great opportunity to have some freedom to an extent and let yourself look into a field that interested you a little more personally than being ask to complete a particular set of tasks.

The exercise as a whole let my brainstorming work on different levels from an inception of an idea and then see how I could evaluate other ideas that had been put forward and iterate on them to make them into a more precise idea. Having the ability to walk away from the idea the end might we were not to become to attached to the ideas at first and just focus on the brainstorming and ideation of the ideas before having to start narrowing down what it was you wanted to focus one for the next few weeks.

Online Team Building Module

This course, and this degree as a whole, as a large focus on being a successful member of a team and knowing how to work within a team. We were asked to complete an online learning course of how to work in teams effectively.

The module was broad and focused on the different people that make up different types of teams. It was designed to help students learn that different people working together need to figure out that variety helps to build towards a successful project but there can be people you clash with. In this instances it was suggested that a person who understood both the persons needs to mediate and buffer between them.

The module was of great effect and a definite learning tool for students of all courses where group projects are asked of them.

My ability to work in groups will be challenged over the course of my studies with a number of studio course still ahead of me, it is good to have a knowledge the different types of people I may encounter in a teamwork environment.

First week of Contacts & Workshop

With this only being the end of the second week and first week of Contacts and Workshops, everyone is still adjusting to being back in the swing of studying and still trying to figure out what is going to be asked of us as students in DECO1800.

During the Contact on Tuesday morning, we were separated into groups for introduction activities and getting to know people which took up the first half of the class. In the second half, we were asked to look at Trove and see what content is available. Trove is going to be used for our assignment and a source of information to be linked to our web applications.

Some particulars for the project were discussed. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and API's (Application Program Interface) will be implemented to help students access the information within Trove and let them manipulate it for our needs. With this knowledge, we were then asked to think of some ideas that could be possible for a web application and the Trove database.

Thursday was the first Workshop for the semester. We ran through a description of what an API does and how we can manipulate it for our purposes. Some other tools were discussed with us regarding using Google Chrome's Developer Tools and shown previous DECO1800 student examples via a course website. It was reiterated that our knowledge of Javascript, JQuery and possibly PHP will be needed to be used heavily this semester and that we should be confident with coding in these languages.

Welcome to DECO1800: Interactive Technology (Course Expectations)

This being the first post, we have been asked to write about what our expectations are for the course. 

During the course I am hoping to hone my skills in design thinking through ideation and prototyping as well as work on my skills on web based coding languages such as JavaScript and JQuery. 

My concerns for the semester are that my ideas may not be able to be completed as pictured in my head due to my limited knowledge of coding but I aim to be practising and expanding my knowledge base as the semester continues. 

For this course, I will be taking notes in the pictured notebook. This will be used for everything relating to this subject and all working/lecture notes/ideas will be taken down in this book. At the end of the semester, all the pages will be photographed and posted on the blog for viewing.