dev-blog

LINKS

Trello

MS 201 Postmortem

Postmortem

Week 7 10/16 - 10/22

Week 7 Journal

Week 6 10/09 - 10/15

Week 6 Journal

STEM 4 Kiddos

STEM for Kiddos Demo Video and Presentation

Final Pitch Video

Pitch Presentation

Demo Pitch Video

Week 5 10/02 - 10/08

Week 5 Journal

Week 4 09/25 - 10/01

Week 4 Journal

Week 3 09/18 - 09/24

Week 3 Journal

Week 2 09/11 - 09/17

The readings this week were quite extensive. Understanding of sprints and scrums and how they operate was quite useful for me in working as the producer for the STEM for kiddos project. I’ve taken the approach of finding out what tasks and roles are still needed. I would’ve taken on the role of scrum leader, but that assignment is already taken by our lead who has been doing a great job of assigning roles and identifying where the team is in addition to regular communication with everyone in the group. When I joined the team, our lead had already created a Trello and discord for communication and task management. Also, other team members created websites, designed learning material, and already started research on marketing opportunities. Luckily, I was able to coordinate with our lead/ scrum master and assign tasks to myself from our Trello Kanban board. I took the initiative to start doing research on acquiring grants as well as advertising opportunities and costs. My focus this week has been looking into possible small grants we could use. Though I’m not able to make most of our meetings, I am able to communicate with the team via discord—which I use daily. This has pretty much been the extent of what I accomplished this week.

As I’ve still been acclimating myself to the team and working on my specific tasks, I’ve tried to keep in mind the information I’ve gained from the readings and chapters. The most useful were the scrum sprints and great team chapters. Presently, the STEM for Kiddos team has already produced a ton of material but there’s still a lot to do. I’ve tried to tie this effort with the readings for this week. Since we do use Trello, the Kanban has also been chapter has been great for understanding how this can benefit the team. It allowed us all to focus on our tasks and understand the work that needs to be done. While keeping this in mind, I’ve found it difficult to forecast how long some of my tasks will take. One of the reasons being that my task requires outside coordination which is out of my control. Also, this task is not necessarily something I’m familiar with as my main role is usually that of a software engineer so trying to estimate how long it will take to try and receive grants is a little out of my wheelhouse. I have found some promising opportunities and hope to have an idea on what the timeline will be for some of these grants if we’re awarded them. I plan on using whatever information I receive as a baseline for future estimation efforts. If I receive several responses that indicate when I can receive an answer, I can then take the average of them and use them for future similar tasks if I plan on applying for more. Some of the grant sites I’ve found allow for applying for multiple grants depending on different criteria. All in all, I think I’ve made considerable progress in the team project and hope to make more next week. The main thing I’m hoping to gain is an amount on how much funding we might be able to receive, how long the process for acquiring the funds can take and also to begin looking into advertising opportunities.