A project for the long run

My reflection on my fourth (and last) Mini Challenge at the Apple Developer Academy

Engaging

Let's get started with the fact that my entire group was super excited about finally working in person, after over a year in the remote environment. We added that to our desire of wanting to work on a project that would last once the challenge's over, since we all felt upset that most of our projects in the past hadn't progressed after presenting, and we landed on a big idea that we all loved: the Academy. We wanted to work on something that would be useful for all of us throughout our last year as students, and that could be useful for next generations. Once it's always been clear to me that I'd like being a mentor to the next class, this challenge was especially exciting for me.

Big idea: Academy || Essential Question: How to improve our academy experience? || Challenge: Improve the academy experience through tangible computation

Investigate

So, since our target was the people in the Academy, pretty much all our research was based on interviewing students and jr. mentors, since they are the ones who will use our product.

We ran different forms for each target, asking from open questions about what they associated with the Academy to more specific ones, validating ideas we had throughout the challenge.

After the interviews, we made our prototypes and ran them on the Beta Test Fair, having guided usability tests for people who wanted to be a part of the process. Unfortunately, we were not able to run the tests for that many people, since each test took around an hour. However, we were still able to gather feedbacks that led to the improvement of our idea and to prioritizing things in our scope.

Act

Finally, came the most exciting part of the process! We stumbled across many issues regarding our personal life. We made jokes on how our group was surrounded by unfortunate events, having more than half of the group members ended relationships during the process, and even a ligament damage! All these events, added to the rush of the WWDC Swift Student Challenge that took place in the middle of our Investigate, made we realize once again the importance of following a scope, being organized and having each other's backs.

When the challenge was almost over we still had a lot to do. We realized we started with some wrong decisions, and ended up having to work extra hard (and having the super hero help from mentors) to be able to deliver something close to what we expected.

This process was very challenging for myself. There was a lot going on in my personal life, which added to my need to help those around me. Going to the Academy in person was one of my main struggles. Being autistic, it was very comforting to be at home, being able to leave and crawl up to bed whenever I was feeling overwhelmed. Even though the academy is a very welcoming place, it's not home, and I really struggled when having crisis, ending up frozen, crying by the front door for hours sometimes. I also wanted to learn new things in coding. Since I always end up developing screen layouts, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn more about the backend, and it almost drove me crazy. Learing how to make proper class diagrams, connecting our app with Firebase, learning a whole new structure (we used MVVM in this challenge, and I had only worked with MVC to this point) was A LOT.

At many times, I thought I would not be able to make it. It felt so hard, and I felt so stupid it made me want to give up not only in this challenge but also in my future career as a developer. But, with the patience of my colleagues and (very smart and patient) partner, I was able to learn a lot. Now I feel proud not only of our product, but also of myself and everything I was able to accomplish.

It's very hard for me to get so much help, honestly. But I decided to embrace the opportunity of having people teaching me complex things, and learn from it. It took a lot of desperation, swearing and meditation for myself, but I feel like I did it.

At a certain point, we also had to re-work on our scope as a group to decide what to maintain and what was going to be postponed. Our idea was a multiplaform app for students and mentors to be able to:

• ask for help in a presencial and remote way
• view an announcements board with Academy infos
• access and edit the Academy's calendar
• view the list of available equipments, their availability and borrow/return them
• integrate with the Learning Journey app (an app made my jr. mentors to help keep track of our development and goals inside the academy)
• suggestion box
• custom user profiles and information

All these functions were also meant to be integrated with the TVs in the academy. This function's development was postponed considering it would take too long to develop, we would not be able to show it in real time during the presentation, since we are back in the remote environment for now, and also because the girls who worked on the design of the app wanted a chance to code as well. Our plan is to work on these functions during the bridge we have now.

I definetely learned that I still need to work more on my scope-defining skills. I get too excited about ideas and funcionalities and I don't want to let any of them go, and always end up working more than I expected and needing more help than I wanted to ask for. Regardless, I am proud of our work, and I really hope it will be used by our class and future students.