The ideal plan and process of the project development according to the Gantt Chart planned should arrive at the stage of technical production and design production happen concurrently. But we are slightly behind schedule.
I starts to struggle.
There's two side of me that is struggling at different things.
As a learner:
I have other assignments on the way and those assignments are taking much time. I have to effectively plan, day after another, one assignment after another. Every day in the week are dedicated for different assignment. But I'm still behind time.
TWP is a team work process. It involves many discussion and have to come to an agreement. There's no point for us to do things differently and disagree, disconnected to rushing things through. In addition to that, I have group members that are very slow in decision making, inexperience in interactive project process and estimation of project working hour. Many things that we do, my team members have to ask for opinion. Meanwhile, we have punctuality issues. Sometimes, the meeting will delay for at most 2 hours plus. There are also times that team members come together but not focus in the tasks given, easily stray away to chit-chat and checking mobile... The toughest thing in this team work is that they're few times the 2 team members cannot effectively communicate and almost fight. These unstable atmosphere affected the flow of the teamwork. As a team leader, other than the busy production schedule, I also need to keep everyone in the team in the same focus of production, not affect by emotion. I was at once almost fall into the emotional wave in the team.
Besides that, the design production needs many round of improvement. I, personally am not happy with the design outcome, the design lead is struggling with the direction and has no idea how to improve. The initiative of research and problem solving skill is rather low and passive. I faced challenge in convincing the leader to enhance the work. So instead of relying the department leader to handle the department, I need to spend time to manage the department leader. So I can't imagine how Agile working method can be applied in this scenario. At the same time my tutor are requiring us to do so.
The vending machine head, Sue Min is working very hard to measure and calculate the architecture of our vending machine. She's very precise, detail oriented. And we got confirmation from MT that she's willing to borrow us her home TV. So we might be slow, but things are falling in place with the work that we need to do.
Technical research throughout the week has hints me that I can't rely normal webcam to execute the interactivity of measuring human posture. The most possible and workable script research I got, are the capturing and storing photos taken from webcam. No significant measurement is working as how we wanted it.
So I have to change the technology to Kinect. As only Kinect allows webcam measure human body joints to allow measuring user posture while interacting with our vending machine. So happened that other groups are changing their ideas at this point and we got spare Kinect to use. So I decided to move on to using Kinect as our main interactive technology.
Worry: We gonna have a CNY break, and we just got the equipments this week, the decision of changing technology is just made, (which means I have no time to try it out as school close and I'm not around), and right after the break I need to show alpha of the project.
As a teacher:
I start to question the practicality of the project design and it's expectation and requirement. Because all my classmates are just high school graduates, with their limited exposure of media and technology, with the equal amount of works needed in other assignments, how can they handle it? I am a teacher and I'm very familiar with the design and interactive production flow, yet I felt it hard to achieve the expectation, and requirement my tutor demand. In my emotional thoughts, I asked, "as much as lecturer are demanding us to do user test in our product design, to see how user interact with it, didn't our lecturer conduct any user test to understand their course/ project brief to understand how their user (students) went through the learning experience?
Of course in this case, I did my part. I make myself remember the importance of doing user test to understand how my students learn and manage my expectation of students project outcome to gage their capability and their time availability so to give them a more encouraging learning environment.
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