Is that a baby in the background?
Said every person on a Zoom call ever 🙂
Greetings from our homes and personal work spaces! How are you all doing? Once again, we hope you’re staying safe and healthy.
Today, we’ll be taking you through our shift to a virtual work-space as well as how we planned on continuing the project even though we were hit severely by the COVID-19 pandemic (as almost all of you reading were).
If this was another normal season in our lives as students, we would have been gathering our materials and getting ready to build a robot for our project. Alas, as life would have it, we went home after our school experienced a seemingly indefinite closure. Initially, this wasn’t too much of a problem because we could always order the electronics parts that we needed and assemble the robot in someone’s home. Then, another wave hit — some areas in Ghana were placed on a lockdown. So, we couldn’t even order the electronics parts. It was a little discouraging but, after all, everything ends up working for our good! Keep reading…
Prior to the 2019-nCoV debacle, we had created a workspace on Slack to keep up with each other even in the event that someone didn’t have access to WhatsApp. A majority of our meetings were already happening virtually and, so, the virus didn’t deal a huge blow to the quality and frequency of our meetings. However, our initial plans were shattered as everything had to be put on hold. We weren’t sure what was going to happen next.
You see, the Phase 3 process of the CCB Design Process is very hands-on and interactive. The first aspect deals with building a prototype, like a minimum viable product, that has the essential features of your final product without the bells and whistles. Then, you test this prototype and use feedback to translate it from the realm of a prototype to the realm of a finished product. We’re going to add some pictures of our initial prototypes (please, don’t laugh). In a later post, we’ll show you the final product and the journey of feedback it took to get there.
Even though we weren’t close to each other physically, WhatsApp and Slack made it possible for us to check in on each other and make sure that we were all doing the work.
Usually, to divide work among team members, we used a random process. However, for some more recent assignments, what happened was that the rubric would inform the sections of the work. Then, these sections were explained in detail and put in the WhatsApp group. The first person to see the message was the first person to choose, and this made assigning the work easier. People chose what they were comfortable with and did an excellent job with the sections that they were assigned.
Because we couldn’t meet in person, we made sure that we were very active on the WhatsApp page. This is one of the major changes that we made to suit the changing nature of schooling online. We also made sure that we completed our work at least a day before. Working from home isn’t easy, and the last thing we wanted was to have a half-assed submission. Hence, everyone respected each other’s time and made sure to do their work on time.
That’s all for now, but check back for updates! Until next time, as we always say, stay safe & stay home.
ToRoCa 