Welcome to my Blog Post #3! As promised in my last post, let’s dive right into the OSU CS467 Capstone Create Project Plan, and let’s talk Figma. As most CS students should know that one must start the assignment early, and our team sure started as soon as this assignment was released. Our team was consistent over the past 11 days in working asynchronously and synchronously on our project plan. Our final document was 15 pages (no double spacing, but plenty of graphical examples). For this project, it’s more than fulfilling our grading rubric, our group fundamentally wants to create a solid and practical plan. From the past two meetings and group messages, I see that my team members are organized, and they are thoughtful with their contributions. I love the energy and I am grateful for being in this group.
Ready for some Figma fun first? I have been introduced to Figma outside of school about 1.5 years ago when my nonprofit tech team needed to design and prototype fast. Recalling my time before using Figma, my teammates and I were using graph papers to draw out the UI screens. Although we still use graph papers for quick in-person sketching, I prefer to use Figma for designing mobile app interfaces and prototyping designs. I like the ability to quickly animate and share prototypes, especially with all of the plugins ready for integration with just a few clicks away. The prototype interactions help me see whether the interactions on each UI frame will meet our user’s stories and their intended actions. I’m a visual person and need time to reflect, so seeing how the screens are connected on the Figma prototype flow has been valuable for me, especially before I spend any time on coding. The Comments collaboration tool in Figma is good for me to note my thoughts for other members’ input on the design and prototype directly. I can easily sort, filter, and resolve comments to keep me on track. Overall, I value any tools that can help me be more organized and productive. I have not used Figma for wireframing or as a graphic design tool. I’ll need to check those out later, along with FigJam as a brainstorming tool. Fun stuff ahead. Now, it’s time for me to blog about this course’s Create Project Plan assignment.
Our project plan consists of 10 sections. It starts with a short introduction on what we want to accomplish for the target users, a sentence on our team member’s experiences that are relevant to the success of the project, and our motivation to launch a minimum viable product in 3 months. The User Perspective section addressed the 2 main target users (K-12 students, teachers) and our client (our course’s instructor). Now that we know our users’ perspectives and the requirements, we can flow into the Software section to document our thoughts on the software structure. In our Requirement section, our team discussed and agreed upon using React website that will be deployed via Firebase, Flutter environment, Firebase libraries, and backend for both website and app. Now onto our thorough description of our Initial Plan that includes implementation notes and a schedule. This section involved each team member’s full participation, including writing and reviewing User stories, data models, and prototype plans. Each team member took the lead in their interest area. We summarised our Initial Plan section with team members’ plan to focus on functionality and then styling. The Team Member Tasks took the longest to complete, and we ended up working on this section at our weekly Saturday meeting. This made sense as we wanted to share and go over our tasks weekly, and most importantly, synchronize our tasks to support each others’ deliverables. Now onto the Graphical Examples section that includes our NoSQL Entity Relationship Diagram, screen captures of our admin website prototype for teachers, and screen captures of our field app for students. We can now wrap up with a Conclusion section, and of course, we must end with the Appendix and References.
Wow! You made it through to the end of the blog. Feel free to leave me a comment if you have any input about Creating Project Plan. I think it’s pretty standard, and as students, we follow instructions and prompts from our course instructor. Overall, this is one of my favorite group assignments throughout my CS journey at OSU. Perhaps it’s because I’m interested in this project and I have good teammates.
Planning for my next post, I’ll blog about our assignment for the Standup discussion. I’ve started working on the mobile app so I’ll talk more about it then! One more quick note, I was able to get my daily meditation on most days, and I got some fantastic workouts in on Sunday. Maybe I should make Sunday my workout day from now on.
Be Well, Be you, Be present,
M :Z
“What we know matters, but who we are matters more.” Brene Brown.
