Week 7

Project:

Everyone interviewed one person (my person was actually DJ, he was our first trial run to see how we should phrase the questions. He was able to give us some feedback on which questions he thought were better and which were unnecessary.) and afterwards we all tried to devise ideas on our own to figure how to deal with certain problems we thought were important to address.

After our interviews, on saturday, we all got together to write the essay. First we found out that some of the problems overlapped, so we had different ideas for solutions to those problems. Unfortunately the paper was limited to only 5 pages, so we made sure to be concise about which two problems we had to address.

Writing the paper was actually evenly distributed amongst all of us. We had two laptops and we divided pieces of the points we had to address in the paper. When one of us ran out of ideas to write, the other would take over, and vice versa. When we reached the 5 page mark in the end, we merged the points for the paper and each person took a turn reading through it, editing, and making sure the paper flowed together.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good group effort, there wasn't one person that was forced to type the whole time and when someone was stuck, someone else was able to take over, so the paper was written quite efficiently. Everyone was agreeable with someone else editing their own information, so we didn't lead to any conflicts. I suppose, from a computer scientist point of view, you could say that we were 'extreme programming', but with an essay instead of a program.

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lecture comment:

I really thought the soap idea was terrific and I sent it around to my nerd friends up in the bay area, I think we're going to make a couple of them over winter break for our own amusement.

On the other hand, while the chumby is an interesting idea, I'm not so sure how marketable it is at the moment because everyone is leaning towards portable phones/applications and embedded devices that you can carry around in your pocket. Though the chumby is a good idea, it's very possible that if you could write the same sort of application for your iphone and just put your iphone on your desk instead. (well if not the iphone, then certainly the gphone can do this since it has an entire operating system on it).