Course Reflection

The course aims:

1. Introduce students to design methods and techniques for the generation, refinement and implementation of design ideas in a project setting.

I felt that through this course i was introduced to many new design methods and techniques, through the use of the lectures displays, contacts and workshops. Through the lectures we were able to learn the basics of how to implement new techniques into our application and new tools that the IT industry uses. Within the contacts and workshops we were able to asks questions about these new tools and facilitate help if needed.

2. Provide students with the opportunity to work in multi-disciplinary teams on design computing projects

Within our group, we were able to gather many different skill levels and individuals who displayed strengths and weaknesses to different aspects of the IT design; this in turn helped us to develop our application as we had group members that allocated themselves to their own strength within the application construction.

3. Introduce students to techniques and methods for effective team work and project management

Within the team development skills and techniques, i felt that we were not taught a lot of items on this topic. Within my group, a few of the team members had disagreements about workloads and un-organisation. I think that in a future I would personally like a individual tutor to talk to us about how our group dynamics are working and make sure everything is running smoothly.

4. Develop students ability to communicate design ideas and outcomes through a variety of forms - visual, oral and written

I felt that this statement was clearly developed as for each assessment task we had to produce a visual element of the application, a written element and lastly as oral presentation. With these three elements combined, i felt that we were taught many different multi-disciplinary skills that will help me individually in the future.

5. Promote and foster creative thinking through projects.

Through the groups having to use an external resource to implement our application, i felt that we were able to think outside the box within our design and technical thinking process. With the external website being Trove, we were given a broad spectrum of concepts that we later created into a application.

6. Promote and foster critical analysis of design computing works - own and of others - through studio discussion, exercises and project work.

Within the contact sessions, the tutors conducted paper prototype sessions and digital prototype sessions to displays to help us discuss our application with potential users and retrieve vital feedback needed to develop our application. Within these session, we were also able to view other groups projects and discuss with them about their application and vocalise the changes that we would want seen.

7. Promote and foster reflective practice through feedback and discussion around project work.

Throughout this course, i felt that retrieving feedback and discussing what changes should be done to our application really changed the way i thought about group projects. Without the use of feedback and discussion, we would not have highlighted the positives and negatives of our application, thus helping our application to evolve into the state it is today.

8. provide students with the opportunity to apply skills and knowledge gained in other courses to design computing problems

Within the DECO1400 and DECO1100 course, we were able to learn about the basics of web design and creative thinking. Within the DECO1800 course i was able to apply these tools to be further developed within our application process.

9. provide students with the opportunity to build a body of work through the design and development of solutions to given problem space.

Within giving the problem space of Trove, I was highly uninterested in the data it provided, although it was interesting how much information it actually stored. In the future, i hope for the tutors choose a more interesting space that other students could relate to better.

Week 14

After displaying out application in the trade show, our application got selected to go in a innovation showcase to display our work. It was fantastic that we were able to show our work to the public and be proud of what we did this semester.

Week 13

Today we did the Trade Show and demonstrated our presentation.

We had a huge group wanting to play our application:

Our group:

Another group application:

Everyone wanted to play our application:

Another groups application:

We bought so many lollies haha:

User Feedback:

From conducting digital prototyping activities and asking for personal feedback, our group was able to accumulate accurate and vital feedback to make perspective changes to our application.

The feedback that was accumulated included the following:

• Many of the users didn’t see the 3 hearts system representing health
•  The users didn’t take interest in the Star Box
• The users wanted the Trove data to be displayed in a more aesthetic manner
•  A more noticeable ‘Return to Game’ button within the Trove Pages was requested
• The checklist should be “clickable” so users are able to view the Trove data, and this should pause the game
• Add more elements to the instructions page
• Explicitly narrate the theme for each level (make it more obvious)
• The users wanted to be able to see the highest scores of the game
• The users wanted the location of the Star Box to change each time they played
• The tutors wanted the coding to be fixed up by commenting, indenting and deleting redundant code, making it more aesthetically pleasing
• Within the menu, the user wanted to click the high scores leaderboard page to lead to the high scores page. This had not yet been implemented
•  The users found the scoreboard page lacked style and structure
• The tutor wanted the Trove data to be displayed in a more aesthetically pleasing manner by adding PDF pop ups to the articles instead to linking to Trove itself
• The users wanted the whole application to be more aesthetically pleasing
• The users wanted more information and pictures to be displayed on the home page of the game
• The users wanted the Star Box to be included within the checklist of the game
• The users wanted to see an interactive menu within the game

From the feedback provided, we hope to make accurate changes to the application to please the needs of our target audience.

From the feedback given we made several changes to our application that appeased our user feedback.
I added more elements to the tutorial page including:

What i thought about this week:

This week i thought our trade show demonstration went really good. We got the right feedback needed to fully complete our application and make it good. I made changes to the tutorial page as well as choosing the right music for the application.

Week 12

This week we were super busy finishing off our final report and our application. This week we had to complete the following:

1. High scores leaderboard page
2. Fish images for animation 
3. Star Box Page. CSS and images need fixing up so that there are more images being returned, the images need to be laid out properly, and the whole page needs to be styled in a similar way to the game. Can someone else please do this, I only did the Star Box page for the WIP because i didn't think nik was going to. I don't want to spend any more time on it.
4. Music - does anyone else want to do this, it really won't be hard, there's just a basic html music tag or something like that.
5. Add a trove page in when the user dies
6. End-level page: Change styling so it fits on the page horizontally, get rid of the buttons, should have more than one image per fish
7. Link in the checklist functionality, do we even have a checklist page yet? We need the checklist to be clickable. 

Game 

1. getting the sizes of fish working properly,
2. fixing up level bugs,
3. getting the difficulty right. 
4. Incorporating animation
5. User controls in-game like Menu, Instructions, pause, mute, go to High Scores Leaderboard.
6. Adding cookies to remember the user's name and what level they were up to.
7. Fixing up the links to end-level page

Other:

• need to decide on what we're wearing, how we're presenting, make flyers/posters/whatever for the contact 
• figure out when we are going to meet before the contact

I focused on developing the music and instructions page.
Lecture
In the lecture we focussed on wrapping up the course and learning about what we had to know about the final assessment tasks.


Development of Portfolio:

In my portfolio, i drew the border and did most of the icons in illustrator. I am keeping the brown, pink, white, grey and green colour scheme though out. This week i plan on doing the "about me" entry.

Week 11

This week we focused on displaying our digital prototypes to our class mates and to gather feedback needed to further develop the game within the following weeks. 

The following photos display the current layout of our game:

We also have a end of level trove data page to show, but unfortunatly we were having technical difficulties with the page, so it was not shown within the digital prototyping element of the class. 

Questions that were asked: 

• Do you like the design layout?
• What do you think about difficulty of the game?
• Do you understand the goal of the game?
• Do you know what elements of the game gain you points or diminish your points score?

Feedback accumulated:

• the users didn't know how to game worked at the start
• many of the users didn't see the 3 hearts/lives system 
• the users couldn't see the star box page box 
• they wanted a bigger screen interface
• the users wanted the trove/star box page to be displayed better
• More noticeable return to game button
• Not very intuitive game , and  we need an indicating system which can tell which fish we can eat

From the feedback gathered we discovered that many of the aesthetic elements may not please all users that play the game but small changes will be made to further develop to aesthetic and functional elements too appease the majority of users. 

At the end of the contract session, the group decided on what further developments of the game had to be done and the plan is for the following weeks. 

In the following weeks we hope to:

- change the layout of the trove pages

- further develop the javascript elements of the game 

- introduce a tutorial page 

- collaborate all elements of the game 

Recently i have been doing the tutorial page, it included the following html pages:

From the feedback gathered, i have discovered that there needs to be a couple more steps added to tutorial. Next week i hope to develop the tutorial page and start the final report.

Lecture:

In this weeks lecture we focused on the different kind of interactions we were shown examples about what today has to hold. We learnt about the different kinds of HCI which included  ubiquitous, ambient, physical/tangle, persuasive and mixed reality/augmented reality. it was interesting about the different interactions and how it is not always just a one-on-one interaction,  

Week 10

This week we discussed what progress we have made over the break. Rachel described how she made developments within the javascript component of the game and how Ailsa had drawn all the fish components of the game.

Within the contact session, the group had a few strong workers to said to our co-workers as much of the trove content has not been finished after a week break. After this we brushed the air and discussed what changes had to be made within the finial application. This included the aesthetic elements of the design and what the potential users wanted to see. 

For next week, we decided what work had to be done to complete the digital prototyping component of this course. Each of us were assigned several tasks that they must complete before next week. 

My tasks:

Start developing the tutorial page and start the finial assignment project.

Nik tasks:

Finish off the Trove components of the game and make sure everything is corresponding with the layout of the established java script layout. 

Ailsa tasks:

To draw the remanding fish for the game.

Eric tasks:

To help Nik with completing the trove components of the game.

Rachel's tasks:

To complete the Javascript, HTML and CSS components of the game for next weeks Digital prototyping assessment. 

Within the lecture we learnt about how to deliver and produce our finial assessment tasks for this course. This include: 

• The Major Project Final Delivery 
• Portfolio
• Online Reflective Journal 

Within the lecture, we saw a number of examples of the portfolio project and how they should be represented. My stress towards the portfolio project is developing as i don't know a lot of javascript elements and may struggle within the development of this assignment. Besides that component, i think i will throughly enjoy the development of my portfolio as i really enjoy developing websites. 

Reading the criteria for the major project, i have been able to gage the professionalism of the final assignment and how much detail has to go into the final project. Within this assignment, i will be focusing my major attention on this part and make sure all information in accumulated for this component. 

Within the online defective journal, i hoped i accumulated enough information each week to fulfill the criteria. In the following weeks, i will be going through old lecture slides and notes to make all information is correctly displayed within the blog site. 

Colour scheme for portfolio: 

Inspiration for Portfolio:

The inspiration for my portfolio is girly and fun. I want all the colours within the portfolio to present me. 

The two photos i have shown above display the inspiration for my portfolio. 

Week 9

This week was the PROGRESS demonstration week. aahhhhhh... it was scary but overall i think the demonstration went well. The whole group contributed well to the tasks assigned to them. It took a while for me to complete the progress document but we finished it! We all decided to speak all together at the presentation. We wrote a speech and demonstrated the application as well as we could. 

This week, we discussed our part B assignment and what had to be finished to get the assignment done. We decided on the final dates for our project and what had to be done by when.  

We collected everyone tasks that had been implemented for the final application and finalised on all the changes that have been made to the initial concept. 

Changes that have been made to the initial concept 

Interactivity

From the feedback given, there are many changes that have been put in place to benefit the finial application. To properly describe the changes, we have broken the application down into a number of steps to show how the changes have occurred.

In the initial concept, we discussed how the game would open with an article of the Great Barrier Reef that describes the damaging effects of human interaction with the reef. This was done to take the user through a basic timeline of the reef; showing the effects that the Great Barrier Reef has had due to the effects of human interaction. After much thought and feedback we decided to remove the article and put in an instructions page. After receiving feedback from the paper prototype, this was changed to an interactive tutorial instead.

When the tutorial page is displayed, the user will have the option to click the “PLAY NOW” button or the option to go through the tutorial. When the user has finished the tutorial or alternatively clicked the “PLAY NOW” button, there will be a page prompting the user for their name. This has to been incorporated to make the game feel more personal for the user. A high scores leaderboard will be displayed at the end of the game. If the user scores in the top 5, their name and score will replace another’s in the leaderboard.

In the application, the game will generate a fish that can be manipulated by the user; the game will also generate many other marine species from the Great Barrier Reef that cannot be manipulated by the user. In the initial idea we did not arrange a specific number of fish species to be displayed in each level, but through the progress we have made of the application, we have decided to arrange 5 different species of marine species to be displayed in each level; meaning that there will be a total of 25 types of marine species displayed throughout the application. This was done to show the user variation between the marine species and to make sure the user doesn’t get bored with the same species of fish displayed; although the specific player-controlled fish will stay the same throughout the entire game. This was done to create an aspect of consistency throughout. In the final implementation of the application, the fish will be animated to look as though they are swimming

The game interface will show a checklist of fish species listed on the left hand side of the screen. This checklist shows the aim of the game very clearly, that is, to collect all the fish in the level. ‘Undiscovered’ fish will appear grey on the checklist, whereas ‘discovered’ fish will be shown in green, as seen in the image on the right. We decided to show the difference in this visual manner to appeal to our target audience.

We have decided against ranking fish species based on rarity throughout the application. This decision was made as it is unnecessary to the scoring functionality, as we have offered other ways for users to finish the game with varying scores.

Obstacles have been included in our final game concept. We are now only including one obstacle to be used, which will be a plastic bag. This will show the user the effects the Great Barrier Reef is suffering due to human interaction and the effects of pollution. There will no longer be any “surprises” in the game, for example a “rare” fish displayed within the interface as it makes the game overly complicated for the target market. If the player swims into an obstacle they will lose 50 points on the scoreboard. The “obstacle” was added to add variation to the scoring system and to facilitate the needs of the feedback given.

From the feedback given, the lecturer vocalized how the game did not incorporate enough Trove data throughout the game. To facilitate this, we incorporated a Star Box to be displayed within the game. The player is able to swim into the Star Box to gain 100 points on their score. The game will then pause and have a new window or tab open which displays articles and images that are related to harsh effects of human interaction on the reef. The topics we have chosen include tourism, mining, climate change, fishing and oil drilling. After viewing the content, the user is then able to return to the game and continue with their current progress.  The trove information received from the Star Box is shown below.

In the initial application, our idea was for each level to be set in a different area of the reef. For example, the first level is set at the northern part of the reef and each progressive level will be further south. The location changes were intended to inform the user of the different species that inhabit that area of the reef, as well as the difference in the issues that have affected various areas of the reef. We have decided against including this in our final concept as we found that Trove had very little reef-specific information. We have still decided to change the background image of each level; however these images will be pre-selected from Trove and will not be determined by a specific area of the reef. This decision was made so that the audience will be ‘rewarded’ with a different background image as they progress through the game.

The background images will show various corals and marine life. In our initial concept the background was designed to show the name of the coral besides where it appears; however we have decided against this as it makes the screen interface too “busy” giving it a congested feel.

When the user loses health, a protective shield will be generated to protect the fish for 3 seconds. We will show this visually in the form of a light glow surrounding the player-controlled fish for the 3 seconds that the “protective field” is used; this action is additionally used when the user returns from the Star Box page.

As mentioned previously, when a user completes a level, they will be taken to a page showing articles and images relating to each fish. If the user loses all health before successfully completing a level, the page displayed to them will only show articles and images relating to each fish they were able to collect.

Scoring System

Small changes have been made to ensure the scoring system is more efficient and encourages competition.

When the player eats a fish, they will gain 100 points. In order to encourage the educational side of the game, swimming into the Star Box will gain the user 200 points. A 50 point reduction will occur when a user contacts a larger fish, or when the user hits an obstacle. Furthermore, the game interface will no longer display a progress bar displayed on the top of the screen. Instead the user will rely solely on the points to indicate how they are progressing through the game.

Feedback From Progress Report

Before our group demonstration, our group decided on three feedback questions we would ask to our peers and tutors. The questions were constructed to get the vital feedback needed for the development of our application and too see what further changes should be made.

The questions and feedback are listed below.

Question:

Should we allow users to manipulate the Trove pages in the application by allowing them to type their own search terms? Do you think adding this would functionality would encourage the users to access more Trove content?

Response:

No, what you have provided is suitable enough, given that you have pre-selected topics that you want the user to learn about.

Question:

Do you think that having a points bonus for Star Boxes gives users enough incentive to click them?

Response:

Yes; if there is a competitive element to the game, anything with a points bonus will be quite appealing.

Question:

Do you think the articles are suitable for primary school kids or should we switch zone type to something more appealing such as pictures?

Response:

No, providing articles and images is fine.

 

Lecture

This week,  we focused decomposition/modularity which meant the 

"Real design/software problems are too big,  need to break into manageable pieces.
Modularisation is the decomposition of a product into building blocks (modules) with specified interfaces." 

To be completely honest, i didn't really understand this lecture that well but I'm trying to break it down a little to find out the really depth of it. 

So for understandings sake within designing an application, there are many problems that you may acquire within performing the code; this lecture helped us understand how to break down the problem and the easiest ways to solve it. 

What i thought:

Overall this week i was very pleased with the report and the demonstration that presented. The lecturers seemed to really enjoy the animation of the application and everything seems to flow very easily. 

This next week i will be focusing on developing the tutorial of the application.