Our poster was our first priority for the night. The poster may seem easy and all but we needed the mockups and descriptions on it, in addition to the actual poster design which took ages to do. Our idea for the poster, after completing a poll of all our suggested ideas on facebook, ended up being Animal Growls (if you remember) but Australian-ised. If you remember the concept for Animal Growls, it has the same idea but the animals will only be native speices of Australia. This was agreed on as Trove, being the National Library of Australia, would most likely provide more Australian animals as oppose to white tigers or pandas.
The poster design featured a dingo in the bottom left corner making a 'woooing' noise to give the idea of our concept. China worked on the script for the presentation, Soobin made the mockups for the poster, Bill started on the document and I collated all the information and images to make the poster.
During the contact, everyone presented their posters and were asked questions and given suggestions to. Though this sounds quick, especially when there are only 12 groups in the contact, it actually took the whole two hours (one hour and 50 mins to be exact). Going around to see the other groups' posters, i noticed that some groups had very similar ideas to ours, e.g. basing the game of animals and guessing the name of them. Some posters did not have mockups. Some were created so well that i felt like asking whether they drew the images or got them online.
Here are some other examples from the contact. I took more photos but the lighting in them is soo bad i really dont want to upload them.
Being a class of teenagers - young adults, you could say our attention span is pretty short when it comes to repetitive activities. I think it was into the third presentation that the class started to lose interest and do their own things. In the time spent waiting for our turn, our team decided to search up places where we could obtain Australian animal noises from.
Here is a sneaky photo i took of my team discussing Australian animal sound effects. If you look closely on the computer screen you can see that at the top of the page it says 'ANIMAL SOUNDS OF AUSTRALIA'. Proof that we were actually working in the photo. Or were we?
For our presentation, we arranged Bill and Soobin to read off the script but because we needed to present for three minutes, the script proved to be too short so China and I agreed to add further information in the presentation by addressing the mockups on our poster. We were the third last group to present so i guess everyone got a little reckless or desperate for time because when Bill and Soobin finished talking (as China and I were about to talk), they started clapping and assumed we were done. I didnt mind this at all. Suggestions were given to our concept and of course, the sound question was asked (about where to obtain the sound). The contact class was ended after this.
All ideas that were suggested have been included in the document, as well as our current ideas in full detail. It was suggested by Bill that we worked on the document via Google Docs, so i created the document and invited everyone in it.
Since the night before last night we had spent all night doing the pitch and poster, the document was basically bare as of yesterday. Pretty much all hours before the contact class yesterday was spent adding final touches to the poster and script, and printing it (and skipping classes to do this. ..) and every hour after the contact class - all throughout the afternoon until early morning of the next day (which is today) - was spent doing the document.
Once we got too tired to care about the document anymore, one by one each of us drifted off to sleep whilst the remainder of us would diligently fight back for completion. In the document, we discussed:
- The scope - the summary of the entire project and what we planned to achieve over the course of the next eight weeks.
- Background Inspiration and Research - here we included everything that inspired our idea, from mutual interests to online/phone games. Prior research to confirming our concept was also added i.e. research of Australian animals and their habitats
- Interactivity and Design Concept - in this section we included the process of the game (its structure, rules, instructions and brief design). A brief section was also dedicated to the design concept of interactive design studios, i.e. the methodologies used (iterative, incremental, waterfall etc.)
- Purpose - what we aim to achieve from producing the application, what we want/expect our users to feel and gain from participating in the application through health, education and enjoyment
- Audience - who we target the application for individually and as a group, i.e. for children and/or for the elderly to help hearing skills and for schools/retirement homes
- Trove content - A small introduction to Trove and how we will be using data from it. A majority of this part was spent discussing what sort of Trove content was going to be used (images, maps, sound(?)) and how we wanted the data, i.e. images not too small and not too big and reasoning for choice
- Mockups - here we included all of our mockup designs and added a small summary of what each mockup was displaying. Most of this section contains reasoning of the mockup design choices, i.e. why we chose to use those colours, fonts, placement on the screen and image/words placement. For each reason, a reason was given with further elaboration on the decision made, i.e. game placed on the left of the screen - because we want children to also work on their concentration skills (not getting distracted) - because we want children to leave the game with as much gained from the game was possible - because we want a positive gaming image - because we want more children to play our game - because we want success etc.
- Reference list - a list of all our used sources in order to support and help write up the document. The Harvard referencing system was used.
Once the document was finally complete, i saved it off from google docs into a word document format and added a proper contents page, header, footer and touched up the crooked/broken structures before converting it into a PDF file. Since i also made the poster and no one else in the group had it (or the document), i volunteered to upload it for the group on blackboard.
The document and poster was due at midday today so i felt that uploading it at 11.30 was a good time. While i uploaded it i noticed that it was taking longer than usual and naturally, i started to get worried. I knew that some people took up to 15 minutes to upload due to server problems with everyone else on at once so at first i was calm, however by the time it was 11.45 i started to get slightly concerned. This was when i cancelled the submission (which didnt seem to even be submitting in the first place) and uploading it again several times. No, this did not work. So i tried uploading one file at a time. No, this did not work. Time was running short so i tried to save it as a draft in case anything happened. No, this did not work. By this time it was 11.50 and i started to panic. I frantically logged on to my other laptop assuming it was my current laptop's fault and used my phone's cellular data in case it was the internet. I was literally submitting the files on two laptops and waiting for them to finish loading in that time.
Then I started whining to China and asked if she could upload it if mine didnt end up uploading in the next 10 mins, but it took forevvverrr to send her just the document. By this time it was 11.57 and i dont think ive ever panicked so much before. Anyway, China uploaded the document literally three minutes to 12. I could not however send her the poster as it was too large (56mb). China suggested that maybe i couldnt submit it because it was too big so in that three minutes left i went on a website that shrunk pdf files. This shrinking process took soo long (i actually remember using it before and it worked waaaay faster, so at that moment i realised it was my internet that was causing the problem). The file did not compress in time. Neither laptops had submitted the poster in time. I nearly died of overwhelming worry. Yea. It didnt upload at all. China then told me to email Lorna explaining the failure of the upload. So i tried logging on into my uq email (on both laptops since the first one was taking soo long). I confirmed after the first laptop finally loading the page after 30 mins that it was definitely my internet.
So pretty much I explained everything over the email and sent it along with the compressed poster (which finally finished shrinking in that time). Seriously, do you know how it feels to fail to submit something that you spent so long on? Something that a whole team relies on? Yea i felt so scared. So anyway after i sent the email, i went to shut down one of my laptops and started closing the tabs that were opened on the internet. By the way, it was 12.40 by this time. Anyway, while i was closing blackboard, i saw that the poster finally submitted.!.! I think it was two or three minutes after 12, but i missed it because i was too busy stressing and trying to open up my uq email. There were actually two posters submitted since i was panicking so much. They were counted as late submissions. This wouldve relieved me soo much but it didnt. It didnt because i realised that i uploaded two of the wrong poster files. Seriously, i must have been so worried to have accidentally upload two of the wrong files. I felt so stupid. So yea i then had to email Lorna again at about 1pm explaining the situation. And you know what? The internet started to run nicely again. Really. I then told China everything and i dont think she was too impressed. Anyway, i had a group meeting at 2pm (for another course) so i couldnt sit around feeling depressed forever. I was still at home by the way, i skipped three classes today just for these two single submissions. Seriously. No doubt i was late for the meeting.
Moving on, you know when its raining and you're in a car and suddenly youre in depressed mode and stare out the window instead of your phone? Yea, this was me on the bus to uni afterwards. Except it wasnt even raining. I was actually so scared that i had let the whole group down. What made me feel even worse was that i hadnt done any (or even touched) my assigned jobs for the course that i had a meeting in, when everybody else had. We have a presentation on monday and were going to do rehearsals today but couldnt because i didnt even have any slides for the powerpoint because id been working on the poster and document for the past few days. Thankfully i have the nicest group members. We worked on something else. At around 3pm it struck me that maybe Lorna isnt like my other course coordinators and actually replies to emails on the same week they are sent (or maybe even on the same day, i thought). So i checked my email and there sure was an email from her.
She said that the latest poster would be marked (the one i sent in the email), and that our group wouldnt be penalised because the document was uploaded on time. I cant even start to explain how i felt when i read this. Seriously, i couldve cried of happiness but didnt for some reason. I told China and you bet she was happy. I dont think ive ever changed my mood from super depressed to super happy so quickly before. You could say the rest of the day i literally skipped and danced and hummed happy tunes everywhere i went. And i lived happily ever after, the end!
This has got to be the longest post ive ever written. I shouldve divided it in two. Anyway, time to rest your eyes. Congratulations that you've read this far. I shall stop writing now and start on that powerpoint that was expected of me far too long ago.
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