Day 2

2nd day and already behind somehow (posting this the day after it took place... but I did start teaching my LEGO robotics class that night, so I guess I didn't have time to post this).

The Projects course was Tuesday.  After a brief introduction to the course we were broken up into 5 groups (I think it was 5) at random.  We then had to give a low resolution plan for getting Larry, the instructor, a cup of coffee.  We had 5 minutes to do it in.  I think all the teams spent a lot of time figuring out what the requirements were, and not enough time on the how we would carry out the plan.

Larry then refined it for us, the simplest plan to get him a cup of black coffee.  We drew a 3 cell comic: get the money, get the coffee at 7/11, give the coffee. I guess if I drank coffee I would have noticed the coffee machine outside of the classroom :-/  The neat one that came out of that was the "find out if the client really needs what they want". Does Larry need coffee or caffeine?  Will a coke do instead?  Things you don't think of under pressure sometimes :-)

Next up SWOT.  Write down our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  Share them with the class.  So 39 people did that... took a while.  Learned more about each other though, and hopefully about ourselves too.  Self reflection seems to be a big part of the program, which makes sense, how else do you know if you are growing and where to improve?

After lunch we got our first assignment, to be shown in "dailies" next Tuesday morning.  In our group of 7 people from the morning, come up with a low-resolution (read: you won't mine throwing it away when you find out it is wrong next week) digital artifact.  That was basically the extent of the assignment, make up your own scope I guess.

First up in our group OARRs (Objectives, Agenda, Roles, and Responsibilities). Next a group SWOT. Next up what role best describes each one of us?  Programmer, Web Programmer, 2d artist, 3d technical artist, UX/UI designer, writer, and photographer.  Next up write down the thing each of us values most.  Beauty, teamwork, sharing knowledge (we had others, this is what we pruned it down to).  Next up spin wheels for a bit, but come up with a few things. Get a bit off the rails talking about a bee for a logo. Somehow come up with Push Button Studios as a potential name.  Next up Larry gives us another tool to use, tried it but it didn't help, spin wheels for a while longer.  Settle on throwing out anything to do with bees and instead go with Push Button Studios.  Come up with a tagline none of us really likes, and a 2 line story to introduce us.  We also settle on making an interactive web page for our digital artifact.

Once I got home (after teaching the LEGO robotics) I talked to Judy about this and it pretty much comes out that the problem that we have is that we, the team, are the product, and that is what we are trying to brand... but it is really really really hard to come up with an identity when you don't have a product.  We don't have a product, so we are going to have to pretend to have one.  Judy also points me at a TED talk that helps and I find a presentation on branding too.  What does a programmer know about branding?!  Not much, that's what! Tomorrow try to get this figured out I guess.