6th Oct to 12th Oct update

We've got lots to blog about since our last post.  On 6th October we went to our second Muffins and Mindmaps session.  The focus was requirements analysis.  We had to came away with a number of things to think about including:

- Who are the stakeholders?  e.g. the group, the children, teachers in the school, parents and governors.  These people will have different needs and ideas about what the project is.  It can be difficult to align the children's needs with those of the adults.

- Setting clear objectives for your project

- Give people models to work with and get feedback on these models (iterative prototyping).  Evaluate your plans regularly.

- Promote discussion by using the models mentioned above.  Think about using the diamond analysis.

After this we had a tutorial with VL to discuss the progress we've made.  She was really pleased with our ideas and the overview we have produced.  She came up with some suggestions about getting local media involved and trying to find some local celebrities for the children to interview.  After the tutorial we emailed some people and got in touch with the Chichester Observer.  We have a few tentative links and we're currently in the process of exploiting these for the benefit of the children.  The Observer has agreed to run a piece about the project this week.  They will follow this up by coming to the school after our visit to the local radio station to take a picture of us and the children.  We hope the children like this! 

Later on in the day we met with JW.  She kindly came into university to meet with us and discuss our plans.  This went really well and JW seemed impressed with our ideas.  we confirmed timings for each lesson and these have been booked in.  We had now made an action plan of things we need to confirm, such as visits and resources.  This was emailed to JW on 8th October. 

On 8th October we got in touch with AW, an ICT technician at the university.  We decided it might be easier to borrow some laptops ready loaded with software that is easy to use and bring these into school for the lessons.  This means we will be familiar with the software which should ensure things go smoothly.

We also had a really good chat with CS, an ICT lecturer as we had some questions about copyrighting this blog and the plans that we publish on here.  This discussion was really useful and we came away with some firm ideas about how to go about this.  CS also seemed to quite impressed with the project that we're doing.  It's really encouraging to hear this from people you respect; hopefully we are doing something right!

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010