It’s the middle of week 2 of the Spring term, and time to blog about my capstone project. First, let me do some general reflection. Since my “first” post last week, I’ve been thinking about this course’s blogging assignments, and how I could use this opportunity to improve my writing. I had to re-read our capstone course’s exploration of blogging and re-evaluate my effort and purpose in blogging. It seems that a good blogger can connect with her or his target audience authentically on a topic. Now, I’m a bit intimidated by the idea of blogging on a relevant and interesting topic that can be of value to a target audience.
I’ll keep things simple for now. I’ll blog to reflect on my weekly coursework and share progress on the capstone project. If I don’t get too distracted and time permits, then I will share my journey on restarting my meditation and exercise routine. Maybe blogging about meditation and exercise will help me connect with readers who are attempting to find balance in their life. I was committed to meditating for 365 days, but I only made it to 180 days before my routine was disrupted. Once my meditation was halted, then my exercise routine stalled as well. It took a lot more effort than I thought to restart the process. Let me focus again here (deep breath – counting to four).
Capstone project update: My capstone project is to build a user-friendly platform that supports teachers and K-12 students in doing Citizen Science. More specifically, an admin website for the teachers and a cross-platform field app for the students. I’ll be working on the Citizen Science App for Kids with two classmates. I’m impressed with my teammates’ prompt responses and professionalism. One of my teammates is working as a senior backend developer. The other teammate is working as an Engineering Manager on frontend web development. I might be in luck with these two teammates because they have skills that I could learn from throughout the project. I’ve been mostly focusing on app development outside of school, and have I shared how much I like UI/UX design? Anyways, I’m excited to put my interest to work. It will be good for me to improve my technical skills, especially in programming languages.
Yes, I’m definitely in luck with my teammates. I love their promptness and focus. Within a few hours of making our introductions to our OSU Canvas group, we started collaborating on a Team Standards google doc and scheduled our weekly meetings for the term. I’m so used to google docs now, and it’s becoming a must for me when working with other editors. Our team members decided to use MS Teams for asynchronous communication and our weekly meetings. As a side note, I prefer Discord because it’s easy to toggle between different servers and organize Text Channels as needed. I’m okay with MS Teams since I use it for my work daily. Our project group created a private channel on Teams; We organized our communication via conversation threads on the Posts tab, and relevant files are uploaded on the Files tab. We initiated a GitHub repo for the mobile app and a repo for the web admin site. To make our lives easier, we decided to use Firebase for backend infrastructure. While one team member added our project on Firebase, another team member quickly created the team’s workspace for prototypes on Figma.
On Sat, 4/2, we had our first video meeting. The meeting took an hour as planned and was effective in addressing agenda items. We discussed design and development tasks, including planned tasks on user stories, layouts design, and the overall development process to ensure the project and team success. We have our work cut out for us. My next major task is to prototype the admin website and mobile app after receiving the user stories. I can’t wait! I’ll blog more about prototyping using Figma next week. I’ll also share more about our Project Plan that is due at the beginning of week 3.
Cheers!
M: Z
“Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” Albert Einstein
