12 – 18 January, 2015:
Two days after the West Coast Trip, the Lending Hearts team settled into room 2410 at the ETC. The first week of the ETC project course was a hectic one, with much administrative work to do even though we have not started building a product yet nor do we know what we are going to build.
On Monday, we met and talked about our expectations, exchanged contact information, and decided on a team name. Our final choice “Baymax 6” is inspired by the personal healthcare robot and friend of the main character in the movie Big Hero 6, which we had seen together as a class last semester.
During the week, we settled on a schedule for core hours and weekly meetings with our client and advisers. We also set up a folder structure on Google Drive for our documents, and a group on Facebook for easy communication. Our first meeting with our advisers John Dessler and Dave Culyba was on Wednesday. They talked to us about the ETC project process and discussed our individual roles, and went over our questions and concerns.
Friday morning was the important first meeting with our client, Vasso Paliouras, the Founder and Executive Director of Lending Hearts. She met with all of us (and Hilman on Skype from LA where he was interviewing) and talked in further detail about the Lending Hearts community and the experience we would be building this semester.
Sam, Wei and Cheryl-Jean attended the “Playtest to Explore” workshop on Friday afternoon with the composition box created by the team, and gained some good insight from our classmates about our initial thoughts and ideas on sticky notes and through asking questions and brainstorming.
The plan for next week is to continue brainstorming and begin Scrum. We will discuss team roles again on Monday for Cheryl-Jean’s RACI assignment for Production and Leadership class. By Friday 23 January, our next client meeting, we hope to have narrowed this down to a few ideas which we can present to her over the phone. Programmers Hilman and Sam have started thinking about tech for the project and are communicating with Steve Audia about possibly using the Unreal Engine. Wei will be working on branding and promotional materials for the initial review on Friday 23 January. Finally, Cheryl-Jean will be adding to the website this week once the ETC project websites have been set up.
It has been a whirlwind first week and we are excited to get started.
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