Before I came to Unboxed my initial thought was that I would be helping the team do specific stuff and never knew it was going to be a learning experience.
My first day: Discover
On my first day I met Vicky who ran me through all the safety procedures. She then let me meet Diana who would be working with me the whole week. With Diana, I identified a problem I wanted to address in my school and defined the needs of the classmates affected by this problem, drawing upon my understanding and experience.We used a tool called Empathy Maps to think about how other students at school who have the same problem say, think, feel and do. I couldn't interview my classmates because I was not at school, I just used what I knew to fill out the empathy map.
Day 2: Define
On day two, me, Diana and Rossana came up with many ideas and then made a storyboard drawing of our favourite digital solutions from the ones selected in the dot-voting exercise. We spent more time articulating one idea and tried to show a scenario where someone would use our ideas.I learnt about the different sections of the matrix and how if an idea is in certain tiers they shouldn't be done and others should be done straight away because of their impact and effort.
Day 3: Develop
During the paper prototyping session, me and Diana cut out little templates and used them to show and tell the story of what someone would do when interacting with the Homework Streak experience I created for the Class Chart app. With Celia, I showed her my idea and the paper prototype to see if it could be built and to see if it had any flaws and imperfections that we needed to change or consider.
Her feedback was:
- Think more about the logic behind boosting the student points
- What prizes school could give to those at the top of the leaderboard (not the current 'boring' stationary)
- To do screen - think more about the logic to prioritise homework
- Think more about the logic for the streaks
Day 4: Delivery and agile
I learnt about retrospectives and how it works. Retrospective is when the team leader asks everyone in the team about what went well, what didn't go well, and what could be improved after a two week period which is called a sprint. I also had a testing session with Jean who helped me improve my prototype.
We did a retrospective for my work experience week.
This experience was very enjoyable. I've learnt alot and met a lot of fantastic people. I've learnt the steps of making an app and now it helps me understand that behind all the things we use there is a lot of process and thinking behind it and it's not easy. So thank you Unboxed team for this amazing experience.
