In August this year, there’s an event being run by the Australian Web Industry Professionals Association and New Zealands Webstock event called FullCodePress:
It’s a geek Olympics! Web teams take each other on to build a complete website for a non-profit organisation in 24 hours. No excuses, no extensions, no budget overruns.
Wow… what a learning opportunity! Something like this, tailored for beginners, would be great for a web design course – with a few small administrative difficulties (like staying at TAFE overnight!). Nonetheless, inspired by the learning opportunities of FullCodePress, our class has decided to trial a very scaled-down 3 hour version once a month.
The idea is that those people who are confident with the process can lead a team 3 people, with the not-so-confident or new students participating to the degree that they are comfortable while seeing a small project from idea to html/css prototype (see Web design challenges for more details). Three hours obviously limits the scope drastically, but we don’t want to create yet another on-going project as students already have enough in their ToDo lists.
To keep the activities both relevant and yet re-usable in a class context, we’re basing them around national awareness weeks (such as Reconciliatin week, or Drug Action week), providing students with the purpose, goals, target audiences and content description for the prototype.
Our class has just had their first 3Hr Full Code Press this morning, so I’m looking forward to the debrief in our team meeting this afternoon (I get the feeling some teams worked well together and others struggled together)! I think there’s so many opportunities for learning in this kind of activity, such as reflecting on team skills, cooperation, design processes, technical skills, seeing different solutions and learning from each other at all levels. I’m particularly excited because it accomodates the type of classroom we have where there’s lots of learners with very different background skills and knowledge.
If anyone is interested in trialling the activity, you can find it (and add to/improve it) on Wikiversity under Web design challenges. Hopefully some of our students can provide some feedback on the experience from their point of view…
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Well,
this morning was a great!! It was a really awesome hands on experience of all aspects of web design.
There was a lot of content to cover so it was brilliant to have to work quickly and under pressure for a deadline.
Everyone came up with something it was a great learning experience good and bad.
For the next time the project, I would allocate more time to the coding of the site.
Overal great fun, excellent experience in utilizing all of the skills we have learnt so far in the course.
Nice one Michael!!
It was great to work on something with clear goals and a definite deadline (and no maintenance cycle concerns :P )
Although we struggled towards the end to get details wrapped up, I don’t think it was because the scope of the project was too large, but because not many of us had experience in managing the multiple aspects (and people) of a project within a short time limit. Knowing when and how to say “let’s move on” is difficult.
Assessing team member skills and delegating appropriate tasks came out as important. My group was great in that both Jen and Vikki suggested things they knew they could do, looked in my direction for agreement, then dove straight into it. We’re a pretty collaborative class and we all have a rough idea of each other’s skills, but even then I think we had our moments of vagueness as to what role to play. It’s easy to see how having a team of unknowns would make a deadline impossible without honest self-assessment, disclosure and delegated responsibility beforehand.
I think the review afterwards taught us a lot about planning better next time. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes with the teams shuffled and people taking on different roles.
It was a really great exercise overall.
I thought it was great!
Having a deadline will help us to practice estimating time better and we get the chance to experience working under pressure.
It is important to delegate tasks to those who are most suited because of time constraints. I would recommend the groups do not split up to do their task, but watch and learn from the more experienced person(s). Or the more experienced person could sit back and instruct the others so they can get some practice (just an idea, but do whatever helps you learn better or gets the task done).
I agree with Andy, knowing when to move on is very important. Byron and I decided to get a rough layout of the site done first and this gave us more time to worry about making it pixel perfect and getting the right colours.
Looking forward to the next challenge!
Thanks Jen, Andy and Jesse.
Glad you three all took lots away from the experience! Great points about knowing when to move on – it’s too easy to get stuck on some detail (colours, wording, semantics) that really shouldn’t have a high priority for a quick prototype (especially with 3 hours hey!).
Jesse, I think your recommendations for the way the group should operate are pretty well founded – although I think Jen and Andy’s group did manage to do both – split up to Get Things Done, while still working together to learn for the good bits. Probably depends on the group that you’re in.
I’m glad it was a fun learning experience for you guys! I was also hoping to get some feedback from people who perhaps didn’t enjoy their group dynamics as much as what you three did, to see if it was still a worthwhile learning experience in their eyes…
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