[Week 1] Development Blog: THE BEGINNING

As the new semester started, our team could not wait to meet up with each other.

On the first day of school, we were excited to be accessing our computers again. Everybody put dibs on the desks that they like, and we all settled in pretty quickly. We all attended the Project Seminar.

Before our client meeting on Wednesday, we sat together and did some research about our client and their product. The Grable Foundation provides grants to kids from early childhood to high schools, and even families and communities. We looked up the client’s website and talked about our expertise and preferred positions in our team. Our client works under the Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU) which is a grant funded by Grable. Our client is expert in education and often organizes competitions for children. One of the competitions they are organizing this year is a video competition on the topic of the U.S. Census, which will be carried out in 2020. We understood that our primary goal was to creatively teach the children the importance of carrying out Census, by the means of entertainment technology. We listed some potential questions that we could ask the client during our first client meeting.

On Wednesday, we met with our client, Amy Davis who visited us in our project room. Amy introduced herself, and told us more about the project, beyond just the description. She mentioned that she is not very technical, but more educational. So, she will be our resource for all the educational things, and she let us take all the creative responsibilities. She works in the Census committee, and she explained why the Census is important not just on a national level, but also on the county level. She encouraged us to fill our census forms next year as well.

Amy told us about our target audience: Kids from Grade 6 to Grade 12. We asked about her expectations from the project. She said that we have all the freedom for creativity. She is willing in taking it to any direction as long as it tells the importance of census. She only had one particular expectation, to not make the app too serious/scary or political. Also, she said she would prefer if our product was accessible to as many kids as possible, and nowadays everyone has a cell phone, so she suggested phones to be our platform. Towards the end of the meeting, we set up weekly meetings with Amy every Wednesday 3PM via Skype.

After the client meeting, we started brainstorming different ideas. We locked on to our platform as Mobile. Since, there was a video competition involved, we thought about merging video recording integration in our app, and make use of AR technology to use filters or life-like 3D models. Something like Snapchat or TikTok.

Towards the end of the week, we started thinking about our team name. We came up with different ideas, wrote them on the board and ended up going with “Concensus”.

However, due to some problems, we had to go with “Census2020”, which was something we were already working with, so we were not very bothered about not going with “Consensus”.