With the West coast trip wrapped up in the beginning of January, the team met for the first time on Monday and decided team roles based on each team member’s strengths and backgrounds. The project is to develop an educational reading game for emotionally vulnerable children on the iOS platform. Kanishk, Luna and Milind are the programmers. Elaine and Ruchi are the artists with Luna handling sound design and Elaine and Milind acting as designers. Ruchi with her experience UI/UX acted as the UI/UX designer. Over lunch, the core hours for the entire team were decided based on the courses each member had taken. The newly appointed co-producers Elaine and Kanishk also reached out to our client Colonial School, which is a school just outside of Pittsburgh who care for emotionally challenged children. We also met our faculty advisor Shirley Saldamarco who had worked with the client before and briefed us on their expectations.
On Tuesday, the team gathered to decide on a game. It was unanimously decided as Team Athena, based on the Greek goddess of knowledge and science. Kanishk and Elaine scheduled meetings with the client and also compiled questions and queries we had regarding the project. Milind, Luna and Kanishk who are the three programmers, met up to decide their specialities and strengths. The team members also did extensive research on educational projects and games both international and ETC projects.
On Wednesday, the team did further research on projects and categorized them if they were relevant or useful to the current project. The team also broke down the project into its primary components and laid out questions regarding each module. The team also prepared the SCRUM board with tasks filled and stuck to either To-do, Blocked, In Progress, Backlog or Done.
On Thursday, the team made the trip to Colonial School and met with the client, Audrey Mowry and one of the faculty Dana Connors. They told us their expectations, needs and also priorities like fun and engaging which were higher with quality assurance being last. We also recorded the meeting for future reference and based on the meeting, we charted and grouped the various findings and came up with further specific questions. Based on the groupings, priority list and questions, we came up with a problem statement. The team ended the day working on the homework for the playtest workshop which was on Friday.
On Friday, we met with Dana and Audrey remotely via Facetime and asked them the questions we had come up with the previous day. We also met with Shirley to update her on the various developments and strides forward made in the previous week. The team attended the playtest workshop which proved to be very valuable for our project and on how to construct an idea based on the demographic constraints. We also finalized the versions of the iPad we will be using to develop the game on. Dana also emailed the types of games the children like to play and their overall priorities when it comes to games and activities.
