Week5 pracA_Six Thinking Hats

Reflect on our project by using the 'six thinking hats' method.

White hat:

Historic data: (all in the form of text or image, other forms will be converted to image)

• art history (artists, paintings, books, etc)
• war history (20th century) (WWI, WWII, Vietnamese Civil War etc)
• architecture(20th century, buildings, genres, etc)
• tourist spots

Facts we need to know:

• Data types
• Data volume regarding application contents
• Data capture method
• the pattern of communication with Trove servers
• Website back-end and database setting
• Interface design issues (style, scheme)
• Gamer interaction method
• Site design issues: how to arrange clickable items in the site
• Story script
• How to set game’s difficulty
• Game introduction (How to play)
• All the question answers are specified into any kinds of proper name or noun

Yellow hat:

This is a game designed for education,  entertainment, skills training (logic, reasoning, English). Because it’s quite challenging, our target audience would be school students whose age around 13-15.

Red hat:

Emotions:

• Happy
• Exciting
• Puzzled

Hunch about this game: gamers would love it, students would love using this game as a learning resource, it could enlighten teachers

Intuition about this game: can be very entertaining, feel exciting when the game comes out, feel exciting when I win the game, passionate on new challenges or new questions, love the way we present historical data.

Gamers

• Confusing about the game
• Getting impatient when exploring or reading different types of information
• Feeling upset, if can’t get the answer, especially after few trials
• Engaging to know the answer when failing the game because time up
• Exciting and proud after getting the right answer
• Getting interest in history
• Developing logic skill through figuring out various questions

Black hat:

• poor back-end experience
• difficult to retrieve text information
• takes too much effort to make more than one theme.
• game design. Hard to design the questions, clues and hints, as well as the difficulty design.
• data display: data structure might be different from different libraries, and only part of the data will be displayed on the web page.
• code formatting
• hard to unify the style of the user interface

Green hat:

• using PHP/Python and the related framework
• using node.js to handle the communication between game, database and Trove servers
• design a container to place all the found clues
• make more than one theme, each theme has multiple levels and can choose difficulty
• the room doesn’t have to be a single perspective, we could design multiple views of the background in one game.
• 3D display with WebGL or Unity
• automatically loads the relevant data corresponding to the theme.

Blue hat:

Apparently, limited by our knowledge, resources and time, we can’t completely achieve the goals that might be realized in the ideal world. However, the basic features of the game should be implemented. For instance, the whole workflow of one game under one theme, or the login system.

Week 4 pracB_forming the group

We revoted the top 5 ideas among the 21 ideas to form the group on Thursday's practical session. As I said in the last blog, I really like the idea "past and present" and all my 3 votes all went to it. But unfortunately, this idea seems just welcomed by a few people and didn't rank to the top 5 ideas so I had to choose another project instead. 

Among the 5 ideas, I liked the 'animal' and 'shipwreck' ideas, but finally chose the 'truth detective' idea. It is a cool game that I'm fond of, very similar to my own idea. The main rule of 'truth detective' is to find out different types of information to get out of a small locked room. 

We quickly had 4 people, formed the group Huffpuff and started writing the team charter. We are a cooperative and efficient team. Once we broke down the team charter into different sections, each member picked a section and started writing it immediately and finished most part of it before the day. In addition, we had a general discussion of the project, mainly focusing on the implementation of the game. I'm sure my team will have a good outcome at the end of the semester.

week_4 pracA_presentation

Last Wednesday we all did the presentation in front of the whole class. I‘m not happy with my performance because I think I forgot to mention many important features of my design. I've been prepared this for days and kept the scripts in mind, but I was still nervous when I was actually presenting to so many people. I remembered that I was trying my best to avoid any eye contact with the audience during the presentation. 

It was my first presentation using English and I thought I'm just not that confident. I can chat with others smoothly, but giving a 'long' speech or talking alone is not my strength. I do need more practice.

Well, another reason might be equally important as well. I was so tired that day as I spent the whole night in the lab the day before because there was something wrong with the lab Macs and it deleted all my files of another assignment due the same day. I had to stay there the whole night to deal with it. It's an accident and I do think I won't come across this situation again.

Other people all did their presentation quite good. I particularly love one of the ideas which is called 'past and present'  and all my 3 votes went to it. The idea was pretty simple, the author intended to retrieve the old pictures such as advertising posters on the newspapers from Trove and compared them with the nowadays posters of the same topic, which might generate all sorts of emotions like fun or moving. I think it was interesting and thought-provoking. Besides, I really like the posters made by Leila, the color scheme, as well as the way to structure and present the information of her 'animal' idea. She is such a brilliant graphic designer.

week_4_Room escape idea

The room escape idea is the final idea of my all five ideas. 

Description of the Game:

It's a web-based game of how to get out of a locked room. The room will have a locked door, objects to manipulate, and hidden clues. The strategy is to find those hidden hints, decipher the code with your knowledge and imagination. The hints will be in the form of questions or annotated pictures, and the user will get part of the password after they work out the hint. For instance, a question like "Brisbane is the __ largest city in Australia" will indicate that "3" is a part of the password. And after the user gets all the password, they can input the password and get out of the room.

Once a user finds a clue or solves a puzzle, it’ll be placed to the sidebar. The user can check those objects whenever they want, and can also use those objects to solve the other puzzles.

Besides, I plan to make more than one theme, and the room will be decorated according to the theme. For instance, I’m planning to do an 'Animal' theme, the room will be a picture decorated with all sorts of animal elements, and all its clues are about animals.

The Purpose:

It can be used for educational purpose, as it could help the primary students gain relevant knowledge about the theme. Also, it can be just for fun and relax.

Target Audience:

This game is made for all people, especially for primary students and those who are interested in history, culture, literature, puzzles and deduction because they tend to be more interested in the content and the form of the game.

Key Inspiration & research

I’m inspired mainly by the popular real-life escape game in China. It is a type of physical adventure game in which people are locked in a real room and have to find clues, solve a series of puzzles to escape the room with a time limit. Based on my research and past experience, those games always include plots or sub-plots and this is why I came up with the idea to make more than one theme.

Besides, compare to the real-life escape game, the online room escape will have no time limit, nor scary and thrilling atmosphere.

Interactions

There are 2 ways to interact with the game, click and drag. The clues are all clickable on the webpage so the user only need to click to find the hidden clues. The found ones will be placed on the sidebar and the user can click to check those clues whenever they want.

At some circumstances, the user needs to drag the found clues onto other objects to solve the puzzle. For instance, if there are TV and plug-in in the room, the user could try to drag the cable that already has been found to the area between the TV and plug-in. If it can be dragged to the place, the TV will be power on and play some video.

Datasets

I’ll use the photos, newspapers, videos or other media type on Trove. The data will be shown as the clues and will be retrieved from the Trove’s database once the user finds them. I’ll add a layer on the photos or newspapers to blur or add some content on them to change it to a clue-like data.

Sketches:

1.   A room

2.   Click the photo on the wall

3.   Focus on the wall, the photo has a question (1.How many legs does a dog have)

4.   Click again to lose focus, click a box, box open, click the paper in it, paper expand and show a question( In which year does the WWF founded, with one letter blurred and can’t see.)

5.   Click again to show a math problem (Uncle John’s farm has 10 rabbits and dogs. He counts that there are 30 legs in total. How many dogs does Uncle John have?)

Reference:

http://www.365escape.com/

http://www.biud.com.cn/upload/news/2013-02-07/post/233469-20130207025101-0.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-life_room_escape

https://www.flickr.com/photos/75905404@N00/8513810774

http://www.iseecubed.com/wp-content/uploads/inspirational-bedroom-animal-anime-colorful-girls-room.jpg

Week3 blog task_ reflection on teamwork

Task: For those that are unaware; your next blog task will be to complete the teamwork module found over at http://teamworkinaction.ceit.uq.edu.au/. We would like you to reflect on how you found this teamwork module useful in relation to your team expectations. You could do pro's and con's, talk about your major concerns, how you could avoid them, and how you think you can be a good team member.
We

Major concerns

Communication
Luckily I'm in a team that all from the same culture and speak the same language. However, I still concern the internal communication in our team as we are from totally different backgrounds. A project will have multiple stages and each of us will play a key role in some of the stages. Only if we communicate and cooperate well can we deliver on time. Moreover, the external communication would be more challenging as there will be a group presentation in the following semester and this is the only chance to show our idea to the whole group to get feedback. To make sure we could get more constructive feedback, we should at first communicate our idea clear enough.

Decision made
We don't have a real leader in our team now and we're not planning to. How to make decisions would be a difficult task of our group. Besides, I seldom argue with people unless I'm quite sure they were right. It thus always causes a fact that as long as someone insist his/ her idea, I'll not insist mine anymore, no matter how I love my own idea. This could be dangerous if the majority of a group thinking in the same way as I am. 

Expectations are not matching
As we are a team of 4, our goals of the course might be different. Someone might want a nice grade, someone might just want to make friends and doesn't care too much of the quality of the project, someone else might want to build a cool game (our project). I sometimes find it a bit difficult to combine our goals together to accomplish the project that meets everybody's expectation eventually.


How to avoid

As for the communicating issue, I will try to make sure that all members attend the regular meeting on time. Also, I will encourage them as well as myself to talk and involve more on the meeting to minimize misunderstanding or social-loathing as best as I can. In terms of the presentation in front of the whole class, I think we'll make full preparation of it. We are planning to write the scripts and practice within the group before the presentation.

In terms of the decision made, I think the best way for us is to vote. I think we will respect everybody's idea and suggestion although only part of the suggestion will be adopted. 

Expectations can be different, but the bottom line is a pass. Hence, I don't think someone who doesn't involve or contribute to the project at all. We set up a goal for a high grade, those who doesn't care the grade that much might do less work. This is acceptable, but if it is too less then we'll supposed to run a peer assessment.



My contribution

I think myself is a funny person and could keep the team in a lively and cheerful atmosphere. Also, as I have the teamwork experience before and have some knowledge of design and programming, I think I could be a good member in the team.

Week 3_Five ideas for the project

Idea 1: Room Escape

Data Used: Photos, newspapers, etc

Description: It's a web-based game of how to get out of a locked room. The room will have a locked door, objects to manipulate, and hidden clues. The strategy is to find those hidden hints, decipher the code with your knowledge or imagination. The hints will be in the form of written questions, pictures or videos, and the user will get part of the password after they work out each hint. For instance, a question like "Brisbane is the __ largest city in Australia" will indicate that "3" is a part of the password. And after the user gets all the password, they can input the password and get out of the room.

In addition, I plan to make more than one theme, and the room will be decorated according to the corresponding theme. For instance, if it is the 'Magic' theme, it'll be decorated with the magic style, and all its clues are about the 'Harry Porter' books, 'The Lord of the Rings', 'A Song of Ice and Fire', etc.

Target Audience: For all people, especially for those who are interested in history, culture, reading and riddles.

Feedback:
To make it more significant at educating the user, I need to make sure the questions or clues are actually helpful for people to gain knowledge. 

Idea 2: Puzzel Game

Data Used: Photos of animals, plants or attractions.

Description: Split a photo into several parts and disrupt the orders. The user will rearrange them to complete the picture. Once the user finished, it'll display the introduction of the photo.
Target Audience: Kids, for educational purpose.

Feedback: 
A slight change can be made, just let the user guess the name of the picture. Meanwhile, they can arrange the pieces for clues. The one who got the correct name first who wins.

Idea 3: Crossword

Data Used: Books, journals, articles, etc.

Description: A word puzzle that takes the form of a square grid of white and black shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. The clues are extracted from the data that can be found on the Trove site.

Target Audience: The people who have a wide range of knowledge.

Feedback: 

I can use the crossword clip on the old newspaper instead of making them all by myself. That'll make it much easier, all I have to do is to display some hints and match them to the right crossword.

Also, I can use a timeline for the user to choose a crossword published on a specific newspaper.

Idea 4: Multiple Choice Game

Data Used: Photos & People

Description: A set of questions, each question is a photo of a famous movie star with four options. The options are the names of four stars and only one of them are correct. After the user chose an answer, no matter right or wrong, the server will return the bibliography of the movie star.  

Target Audience: The people who are fond of movies and movie stars.

Idea 5: Matching Game

Data Used: Photos & Movies

Description: Similar to the first idea, but displays four photos and related movies, the user are gonna match them in a right way. After that, a description of those movies will be shown on the page. 

Target Audience: The people who are fond of movies.

Week 2 Workshop_Trove API

Trove has API for us to query most of its data as long as we have an account. In order to get it, we need to login and apply for a key. Trove categorized its data to several zones and the attributes of data from different zones are slightly different from each other. We can access the data in a single or multiple zones at a time. After the server gets the data, it'll be sent back to the client and display the data to the user.

To search for "wragge and weather" in the zone "newspaper" as an example. The response data contains the basic information of the name of the zone, the quantity of the results which is 20, the quantity of all records which is 47497, and the concrete attributes of all 20 articles. Compare the code with the result page on trove and you'll find they are consistent (The total number of newspaper is different from the current one which is 48, perhaps it's because the response of the API displays the data at the time they executed the code).

Week 2 Contact Session _ Exploring Trove

Exploring Trove

We were asked to find out the connections between the data on Trove to think of some interesting ideas to make a website, app or game based on these data. Also, there should be a specific target audience of our ideas. Before brainstorming, I had a quick view of Trove. It is an online library that has so much information and categories all its data to ten main sections. Even so, each of those sections is still a big database with plenty of resources. Thus, our group decided to break down the brainstorming to an individual process. Each of us digged into the content that he or she was most interested in and then shared with the group.

As a huge sports fan especially crazy of soccer, the first idea came to my mind is a web-based guessing game of famous athletes. The game was like a multiple choice. We show a childhood photo of a great athlete, Zidane for example, and provide four options for the user. If the user got the right answer, a brief bibliography of the athlete will be presented on the web page. The target audiences of this game apparently are the sports fans like me. I also had a matching game idea, you can see it from the lower half of the butcher's paper.

There are also many brilliant ideas brought by other people from our table. For instance, Rena wanted to build a tour app not only to show the route and attractions but also provide the information of a site's culture and history, which will meet the expectation for the tourists with great curiosity for in-depth knowledge.

To broad our view, we then had a look at some previous work by former students and surprisingly found an idea quite similar to Rena's. Nevertheless, we were still inspired by some brilliant work and since the girls all loved fashion, we discussed and came up with an idea to introduce the clothing history. The core concept of this idea is to develop a game to dress up people with the style that matches the era they lived in. It is clearly presented in the picture below.

Week 1: Course Expectations

Based on what I know of this course, I expect to be doing...
At first I thought it was a studio that gathered students from different backgrounds together to do a group project and each in charge of the relevant part in the project, which means me as a student from interaction design will only do the design work in the project. However, during the first week's lecture, when the lecturer said that as DECO7140 (Introduction of web design) was the pre-requisite course and basic programming skills were required in this course, then I realized that every student in this course can contribute to the project the way they want to.

Different from DECO7110 (Design thinking) or DECO7140, the project in this course is not just a front-end project but incorporates back-end design and implementation as well. It sounds really cool and challenging to do both design and programming for a real-world product.


I want to learn/experience/do...
What I want to learn in this course is the photoshop and programming skills, both of which need practice constantly. Also, it's always a pleasure to make some new friends.

I’m worried about...
I'm not that good at visual design and I'm struggling using the tools like Photoshop. I learned it online all by myself before and I found it really hard to be practiced at it. In addition, there are some presentations during this course according to the assessments. I might be nervous talking in front of the class.

I hope that I can...
I'm not a social-loathing person but can be silent under particular conditions. I hope that I can be talkative in class.

In addition, I wish I could balance all the assignments (individual and group) well and start early.