Progress Report

The progress report is due tomorrow (or really, today) at 4pm. Since China and I are busy tomorrow, we pushed ourselves into finishing it today to upload it as soon as possible as we wouldnt have time or our laptops/the internet to do so tomorrow. Its 4.30am and im happy to say its complete at last. Can you believe us. Finally, our first completed task thats done hours before its due (11 and a half to be exact yay). Disappointingly its was still completed in the early hours of the morning.

China left to bed about an hour ago so i completed the report and converted it to a microsoft word document (from Google Docs) to add a cover page, contents page, header, footer etc, before converting it to a PDF file. I could have easily woken up earlier tomorrow (or in a few hours of today..) to upload the file but i admit that im honestly so scared to have uploading problems again so i tried uploading it just then and i think its safe to say that our progress report has been uploaded! 

I shall now go to bed. 

Our Presentation

I dont know if our presentation reached the 5 minute mark or whether it exceeded it either but i admit our presentation was a little unorganised.

There was  a whiteboard with the order of teams presenting in the room when we came in and our team was first. What are the chances of this happening? I dont know why though but thankfully the second group switched with ours and we went second instead.

Before i continue with how we did, i will firstly confess our unpreparedness before class. Overall, we knew what we were going to talk about however we did not have a plan to present. In addition to this, our files were not uploaded online to our zones yet.

As the first group started we came to the conclusion that everyone else had a powerpoint to go with their presentation. It was discussed last night whether we still needed the report to accompany with our presentation since its deadline was extended. I had agreed to extract the main elements from the report instead to use in the presentation, this included the plan for the rest of the year for our project (work distribution etc).

While the first group presented, we rushed into making one of the fastest man-made powerpoints to have ever been made in the history of the universe. It feels as though the first group did not reach the five minutes because we were so busy making a powerpoint and planning what we were going to say and who to say it. Before we knew it, it was our turn.

We sort of hesitated at first in hopes that of all the possibilities on earth, the smallest fraction of unlikely chances would fall upon us and enlighten Lorna with sudden kindness so that she would sense our struggle and miraculously grant us to be one of the last groups presenting instead. Of course, this did not happen. Rather, we walked over to the front with failed confidence.

It took us a lot of time setting up our laptop since our files were everywhere. Our codes and powerpoint were all on a USB, the images were from our blogs and the laptop also had some coding. Then we started talking. At first i think we were going fine but then Soobin lost for words and signalled one of us other members to take over. This made things really awkward because i think i was supposed to speak but China did instead (thankyou China). Then the rest of the presentation involved 50% awkward pauses because we didnt know what to say next and the powerpoint somehow didnt aid us through this.

When we demonstrated our digital prototype - or actual application so far, one button did not work when it did just before the presentation on the table. This confused us, lowered our self esteem for the remainder of the presentation and therefore set us in a position that was more vulnerable to mistakes/faults such as stutters, mind blanks and awkward pauses. It was later realised that we had tested the files that were on the laptop and not the USB, where only the USB files contained our latest updates and an actual working application.

The challenges we spoke of elaborated upon our difficulty of filtering the animal articles. Our focus was on retrieving articles from Trove on a specific animal (and this was able to be done), however we could not filter our searches to bring forth only the articles that related to the game. If we searched up crocodiles, for example, articles of crocodiles would come up as well as stories about fashion with crocodile skin. We did not want this in our game.

In the end, we were given feedback regarding the coding of our application. Lorna wanted to know if the randomly generated articles from Trove were actually randomly generated articles from Trove. We admitted that at the moment, they were just randomly generated photos of articles from Trove. In summary, we took the longest time to prepare and present and received the shortest feedback. I have to say i walked back to our table with a lot more confidence knowing that we finished our presentation, despite all the flaws.

Other groups that presented all had prepared powerpoints, working digital prototypes and three items in which they wanted feedback on. Good on them.

After we got back to our table, we agreed that one presentation should not be so poor as to drag our marks down. We have done so well so far, one presentation shouldnt give all our hopes up. Since all of this week's tasks - the presentation, demonstration and progress report - are worth a total of 15%, and the presentation & demonstration weighs 60% of the 15%, this meant that the progress report weighs 40% - 6% in total (and the presentation and demo 9% in total). We agreed that this report would be the report that pulls our marks up. We plan to continue on the briefly started report tonight and not stay up all of tomorrow night and Saturday morning to finish it, since it unfortunately seems that this area of assessment is what we expertise in.

After the report is due on saturday, we start our mid semester break. Its only a week long and upon returning from the break, there will be a load of assignments that will be due. We all know deep down that this holiday will demand for work catch up and assignments and that play, relaxation and rest will have to wait until the end of year holidays. Oh the depression.

Work Distribution

For the progress report apparently we need to mention the breakdown of tasks and its priority, as well as who will be doing each task and when we plan to finish each task. I made a Gantt chart that sums up what our group plans to do from now until the deadline for the whole project. 

 Plans table

Gantt chart 

Progress Update

Due to the presentations this week, we are only required to attend the workshop or contact session that we have been assigned to present in. This means that our usual workshop on wednesday was unnecessary.

Our coding so far is slowly progressing and it seems that we have a few working elements in the application. Earlier today Bill and Soobin took care of the functionality of the application; this involved getting the game to do what we wanted it to with basic javascript and html coding. Also done by Bill and Soobin were the selection of Australian animals (20 of them) and research on Trove for their images and articles. These tasks were all shared onto facebook. China had started on the menu page for the application as well as the instructions page. These pages were done in html and included the basic buttons that featured on the pages and the brief images (i.e. logo) that would be displayed on every page. Once China had completed this, the files were also uploaded to facebook. I started the results page for the application. Though the act of getting user input (incorrect & correct answers) is more important than the buttons and page appearance, i had only managed to add in buttons to the page to go back to the menu or proceed to the ranking page. Following this, i started the progress report on a document on google docs.

The Menu so far..

Instructions page

Results page

*Note that since the instruction and results page were long (and required scrolling) and could therefore not fit on the screen, i zoomed out to take these screenshots so the size of the buttons are not actually that big compared to the fonts and images. They are only that size when the page is set to 100%. Which i only realise now might be an issue for the final application. 

Our presentation is tomorrow.  

Contact 18.09.14

There wasnt a tight plan for today's class. Since the presentation and coding checkup was due next week, we decided that the best thing to do in todays class was start the coding.

Before starting the actual work, we tested around with the previous years' applications to see what standards were set as high and what applications were most similar to ours. Small details from each application were taken into consideration. We noticed that the Brisbane Locator application, for example, had a timer that did not pause once users clicked on a hint, but paused when other elements were clicked on during the game (such as clicking the instructions mid-game). This meant that the time it took users to read the hint was used up in the game play time. This was a feature that our group did not particularly feel was best suited for the game.

After testing a few applications, we decided to assign roles to each member since this was suggested in order to carry out the coding of the application best. While discussing what roles we had, we got carried off and started debating on which programs we had to use for our application (i.e. whether it was best to use HTML, Javascript, PHP etc). In the end, it was suggested by a tutor that using HTML and Javascript was the easiest and that most other groups were also using it. While we had our chance with the tutor, we decided to ask him to guide us through starting the coding since we were in need of advice on where to start.

The tutor proved helpful as he guided us through a series of different tasks such as getting images from Trove and randomising them in a manner that was easy and appropriate. He took us to the basic steps in searching up different animals by basing all the coding from the examples from the course blog. The tutor suggested that we first did the important things, such as attaining images from Trove, then do the tasks that revolved around that, e.g. the response when users would click on the images from Trove and what to do if they were correct/incorrect. It was made clear during this time that the presentation needed not be a complete functionality nor did it need to look appealing. Since we were all only free next tuesday (from the poll on doodle), this gave us a shorter time to work on everything as oppose to other groups who may be presenting on wednesday, thursday or friday. Given that the presentation didnt need to look like out mockups (yet), it was agreed that working on the coding part was our first priority between now and tuesday.

This is what we managed to get done with the tutor. 

In the coding, it was specified what animals would come up and they were numbered so that when users searched, only results that we had allowed showed up. In the example above, you can see that all results are mice. In the example, we also only limited the results to be from newspapers. 

After the tutor left us, we were still unsure where to actually start working. At this time, Lorna came around and she explained her best on what we should do. This was basically everything that the tutor had told us however we asked some questions regarding our application and were a bit more clear on what to do. 

After Lorna had left we went back to the first task after being so carried away and decided who would take responsibility for each part in the application. Because China and I admitted to our weak knowledge in coding (especially Javascript), and would therefore struggle doing any parts ourselves, it was decided that we do everything together but keep constant updates on what we were doing and what information we found in case two people did the same things. Like our documentation which worked well in viewing and modifying the latest of our tasks, we decided that using something like Google Docs would best suit our situation for the coding. 

We decided that our homework as group for tonight would be to play around with the coding that we had achieved today, and change/apply any from the examples to reach what our application aims to perform. Tomorrow, we will start researching and adding in more functions in our codes. Everything done will be shared with all group members to avoid wasted efforts of completing any tasks twice. 

***

Update: I am continuing this post now several hours after i started it because the time slots for the Work In Progress presentations have been uploaded by Lorna, and it seems that our team is still safe to present during our usual thursday contact class and not on tuesday. Hurrah, more time to work on it :)

Workshop 17.09.14

Since i didnt finish last week's assigned task of doing the FlickTwitter thing, I did it again today. The rest of the class also did it today.

Before starting the FlickTwitter task, we discussed some of the things that would be due over the following few weeks such as the Work In Progress Presentation, Progress Report and Blog & Portfolio (which is still due ages away). The Presentation would be done next week and apparently, we are expected to not only say what we have changed since the first presentation, but also show all of our coding and progress thus far. This is happening in next week's contact class and no ones even started any coding in our group. I guess one of the purposes of this presentation aims to make groups start on their projects.

After this, Khoa drew up a concept map sort of thing for the different types of applications that the different people in class were doing, such as games and map related applications. The purpose of this was to divide up all the parts in the application and assign roles for each member in a group who would do them and when they should be done by. Im the only member of my group in my workshop so i didnt do that but i drew up the concept map for The Aussie Wild Challenge.

I then went back to doing the FlickTwitter task but got stuck but Khoa was busy helping other people. Then i logged on here to blog today's post so far and Khoa is still busy so my FlickTwitter task is pretty useless right now. I am now waiting. I cant think of anything else to write for today's blog.

I actually didnt know about the Portfolio until an hour ago. I remembered it being mentioned in the first week but didnt know anything about it until it was mentioned again briefly in the workshop just before. As i am reading over the assessment overview on the course blog now, im being reminded of so many things i forgot about. I just read that I need to attend at least 80% of workshops and contacts to pass this course (thankfully i havent missed any so far). The online reflective journal (is that this blog?) and portfolio are worth 20% each - i didnt know that either. The two reports are only 15% each and the final project is worth 30%. I didnt know any of this. This waiting period has proved to be pretty useful. Yes, im still waiting.

Do these posts need to be formal? Because mine are getting so informal each week. Why am i asking this on here? I do not know.

***

I am continuing this post now at night because during class i finally did what normal people would do and moved onto the next step while waiting for Khoa. The next step required me to continue my work by following the steps on www.webdevdoor.com/php/authenticating-twitter-feed-timeline-oauth/ which was actually really detailed, so i guess i finally knew what Khoa meant last week when he said the steps were really explanatory (and i disagreed because i didnt go through the real steps yet).

During the next hour and a half or so, i went through the steps and occasionally got confused but eventually figured everything out. I didnt finish all the instructions but i was up to one of the last parts where i had to apply the given codes with my access tokens and consumer keys. The only thing that stopped me was actually not being able to locate my consumer keys that they were supposed to give me (such a silly reason i know). I had all my other keys though.

Where I got up to. Instructions (left) & coding (right)

I purposely took the photo to be blurry in case you were judging my photo taking skills by the way. I couldve taken a screen shot like what i always do but according to the website, i need to actually keep the consumer key a secret. The key "should never be human-readable in your application", it says. Hence the blurry quality so that its not readable. I think the way they wrote it made me feel pretty scared, my consumer keys not even on the screen (i couldnt find it remember), so yea i dont even know..

At the end of class, Khoa was finaalllyy done with everyone else just as i logged out. He asked me whether i had finished everything and reluctantly i said that i hadnt with the biggest yet most shameful smirk on my face. I overheard him asking this to many others in the class that also hadnt finished and he told everyone else that first thing next class, they had to show him their progress. But i honestly dont remember him telling me this. Maybe my grin saved me. But i guess its one of those things one must assume and be prepared for anyway.

Contact 11.09.14

The paper prototypes that were made by our group were today's main focus in the contact class. Soobin volunteered to print the prototypes, and indeed came to class successfully with the prototypes. I think everything was good apart from the fact that we had a missing instructions page.

The first 15 minutes of class was spent setting up the prototypes. In this stage, im assuming what Lorna wanted us to do was come up with the tasks that we wanted our users to do and get the concept clear in each group member. In this time we also decided who was going to stay and instruct our application to other users, and who would be users to other groups. For the first thirty minutes, China and I left to give feedback to other groups while Soobin and Bill stayed back and shared our application to participating users. We swapped around after another 30 minutes.

Our paper prototypes (with additional drawn segments). 

The first thirty minutes:

China and I:

China and I visited a total of five other groups around the class during the first thirty minutes. The different groups we visited included:

- a game where users had to spell an animal's name by dragging letters to the provided boxes, based on the image of the animal. Its a bit like 4 Pics 1 Word but with one image of an animal. 

- a time based sort of game where users needed to order several different images of landmarks/locations based on their age

- a timeline with four different eras which provided information on different events, inventions or other concepts worth mentioning for the century

- a fish game where users (playing as the fish) eats smaller fish to grow and eventually dominate the sea. Each time the user eats a fish, information from the species will be provided 

- a stranger/more confusing application with multiple activities which include viewing images, viewing the calendar, viewing the map etc. on different things - all set in a room (each object in the room denotes an activity, e.g. globe = maps, calendar = calendar..)

I guess you could say that China and I gave a pretty decent amount of feedback back to each group. They all considered the ideas and feedback carefully which made me feel pretty special aha.

Soobin & Bill:

I managed to go through the feedback that was given back to Bill and Soobin when they organised the first session. Since the prototypes were rushed into making earlier today, the prototype that we had was not updated with our actual ideas and some elements were missing. Due to this, they attained feedback based more around the adding of the elements. Their obtained feedback:

- adding in a back button in the ranking & results page

- adding in a replay button for the sound hints

- adding in another hint (so there are two) for each level to ease the game's difficulty 

- keep the hints simple (dont overcomplicate the hints - dont provide long/hard articles or blurry footprint images)

- dont make any of the hints too similar to other hints 

- article hints may be too difficult for children 

- introduce all hint types in the instructions page (so users are aware that there will be sound etc.)

- adding in an option to connect to facebook and share the score (i thought this idea was really smart)

- adding in a skip button in a level that can only be used once by users. It will not reduct any points/lives and will act as a refresh option if users are too stuck (i also though this idea was really smart) 

 Sneaky photo of Bill, Soobin and some users (they werent even posing or anything and they actually look hard working, i mean look at their faces).

The second 30 minute session:

China and I:

I think we hosted a total of 4-5 users. By this time though, we improved on a lot more of the interface design (adding in all the missing buttons and actual questions and answers), so our feedback was a lot less detailed and was more positive (or people just got really lazy by this time). One of our users was actually really focused though, he gave a lot of ideas on improving the design and even asked us on our coding (which only Lorna has ever done before), so good on him. 

Our feedback: 

- having a login system where users will be remembered for their scores

- having the sounds with the answers so that users can trace back the location and footprints/sectioned body part of the animal - so the game is somewhat reversed

- manipulate the images from Trove if we can because apparently its possible to do, so we can alter the images a little (the images that are parts of animals as hints) to make it more enjoyable (?)
- randomise the hints carefully (this is more of a reminder/advice than feedback but thankyou anyway to the guy who said this). So dont have two consecutive hints or two+ of the same hints in a game as this will give users an advantage.

Soobin & Bill:

I have no idea what they experienced during their visiting times, but i do know that they got a little lazy and kept returning back to our table after visiting each group ahah.

The last part of class:

After all the moving around was over, we all reunited as a group and shared our feedback and ideas. I think today's class was pretty productive. I dont remember of any assigned work for next week's class but i do remember Lorna reminding us about our progress report thing which was due in two weeks..... it feels like the first document with pitch & poster was only due yesterday. Time goes by way too quick. Im not looking forward to another all nighter. Really. Lorna also advised us that we should back up our coding in case it all gets deleted somehow (like a group last year apparently). I was pretty distracted at this time so i dont know how were supposed to do this with our zones (?) but i think other people were paying attention so thankyou to those people who i will most likely ask in the near distant future.
P.s. A friend from another group noticed that our results for our document was out. I dont know if its any use mentioning on here but all our hard work paid off and we got a seven :) :) :) :) Most of our comments were just saying that everything was in a lot of detail. Yay, I'm quite happy since the uploading troubles meant nothing but yeahh i think my posts are getting more informal every week..

Anyway, think thats all for today's class. Bye.

Workshop 10.09.14

Today the workshop was loose compared to previous classes. The class all worked on different things since DECO2300 had something due in 2 hours and apparently some people had that as their priority. Chinas not in my workshop but shes the in the one before mine (in the same room too), so sometimes she stays back and accompanies me in mine (not that i dont know anyone else in the class or anything). Today was one of those days where she stayed back. :)

Khoa went around and taught/guided people through different tasks that related to their work. Khoa taught China and I how to do a timer for our game which involved javascript/bootstrap/mouse click javascript/jQuery & textwrangler. China left 30 minutes into the lesson so she only watched up to the first few steps which was where that task was stopped anyway.
Some things we used (and never completed):
- http://jquery.com/download/
- http://getbootstrap.com/components/ 

During the lesson (well for the first 30 mins), China and I also communicated with Soobin and Bill via facebook about the paper prototypes for tomorrows contact class. We briefly discussed yesterday what we had to do but nothing was really assigned/no one volunteered to do anything until today. We agreed that one person should the whole task to keep it consistent.

Since our javascript skills were pretty low, Khoa was unsure where to start teaching us so he switched the tasks around a few several times - hence all the applications we opened and never completed above.
In the end, after China had left, Khoa showed me the Flicktwitter example that Lorna showed us during one of the previous lectures. There was a file that could be downloaded that allowed us to apply the same concept to any other application, and that was what Khoa wanted me to do to our Aussie Wild Challenge game. He said that the instructions were very clear and elaborated, which actually encouraged me to work hard this lesson without his help. I was expecting like a whole massive page with long steps. Honestly though, i didnt find the instructions to be that clear.

The instructions.

Contact 4.09.14

Today in the contact we discussed in our groups what our application would contain, what it would perform and how it would do so. Each group had their own whiteboard to draw their ideas on to make it easier. Surprisingly, this took up the whole two hours.

In each group, we needed to discuss the most challenging part of our application, the soul/essence of the game and draw the process of the game in action (and include what data from Trove it uses).

Lorna came over (to every group i think) and discussed our ideas with us. Again, it was mentioned that attaining sound may be a difficulty. Before Lorna came we also realised that attaining maps from Trove may be a challenge. We concluded that maps would most likely be obtained from another database instead, which is bad. When Lorna came she asked us how each hint would be displayed (like was there going to be a particular order of something) and we said that they would generate in a random order. Then we briefly (very briefly) went through the coding for the application.

My phone died just before class started so i couldn't take a photo of the board, however i asked my group members to take one for me :)

(Photo supplied by China) 

This is our board displaying all the screens that our application has (from starting to closing), with labels. 

I actually added heaps more to the board afterwards but no one took a photo of it and i felt annoying for asking someone to take a another photo so im going with this one instead.  

For next class, we are assigned to come with paper prototypes of our application and i assume were going to go through them and discuss any flaws from the design or present it to some other groups to play with or something.

Workshop 3.09.14

In the workshop today we were taught how to manage the 'celebs' file in Filezilla. We were taught how to add in new rows in the database to ideally make a new celebrity with an image and all. This process confused some class members such as myself. Many agreed that the tutor was going a bit too fast for us to follow.
After this we were taught how to use Google Map's API system to incorporate the maps into our projects (if we were going to use maps, which in my case did). After the class had successfully done this, we were then taught how to reference the APIs and then add markers into the maps. Due to the black background of the program that the tutor was using to display his work on the projector, many of us could not see what he was doing so he had to walk around the class doing the steps on everyone's computers separately. Halfway through the class, time was over and we had to leave the room. So not everyone gained much from this task (no, he did not reach me yet so i dont really know how to add markers).

Working with phpmyadmin as you can see.. and TextWrangler & Filezilla in the back. 

Google maps using TextWrangler and the API and some other codes attained from google developers. 

I think this is my shortest post yet. :)