Week 1/2

// Questions

Based on what I know of this course, I expect to be working collaboratively in a group to produce an interactive product that will extract data from an external server (i.e Trove). More generally, I expect to pick up new technical skills, improve my creative thinking and actively participate and engage myself in studio-based learning.

I would like to learn technical aspects associated with the project such as using languages/tools like JSON, JavaScript etc so that I can apply this knowledge to future projects that require the similar function of extracting data from an external server. I want to experience the design process - from ideation to testing, improve my creative thinking and learn from any mistakes made throughout the semester.

My primary worries are feeling lost in the technical aspects of the projects, as well as being part of a team whom may not feel as motivated as I am. These can be resolved however by asking questions (i.e to the tutors) or self-learning when necessary, and speaking openly to the other team members and ensuring we are all on the same page and understand each others’ goals for the course.

I hope that I can come out of DECO1800 a better designer, developer, creative thinker and team worker. 

// Contact

During the first contact session, two others and I came up with some interesting ideas for the project. One idea was an interactive learning game for children about the history of trains in Australia. Basically the user would hop on a train which would take them to different ‘Time Stations’ (e.g 1890’s, 1940’s etc). The train design itself would evolve according to the time frame it is in, and at each station, the user will learn about the trains at that time and play a mini-game relating to it.

Another idea one of the others came up with was similar to the first idea in that it is an interactive learning tool aimed at children, however instead of trains it teaches children about programming. The questions/activities would stem from some of the programming resources (textbooks, articles etc) on Trove.

An idea I came up with, is a mobile application that notifies the user if they are standing anywhere in Brisbane where a historical event had once taken place. For instance, say the user walks into Central Station when suddenly they get a notification on their phone. The user checks it to discover (so many years ago) what it looked like when it was just being built, through photos, perhaps a video, and accompanying text. In order for this to work, however, the app would need to be able to extract historical events and their locations from the records in Trove. Going through each record would obviously be too tedious, and so some sort of autonomous program would need to be built for that. GPS would also have to be taken into consideration. In general, the concept could be very effective, however implementing the technical aspects may be very time-consuming, complicated and outside the scope of this course. 

Our ideas

A news article on Trove dating back to the 1883. Could be useful for the GPS historical app.