How did you use or develop or grow your 5 C's?

This activity boosted my skills in both communication and collaboration, as it was heavily focused around being able to emphasise with others and put yourself into their shoes. I combined my partner's retold experience with those of my own relating to the same problem in an attempt to see things from her perspective, also repsenting my skills in Critical and Creating thinking. By allowing myself to visualise this new way of thinking, I could really connect with her struggle on a deeper level and then design a product that would solve all of her possible frustrations, something that even I would be happy with as well.

Something I found difficult during this activity was that I had to keep the length of the pitch within 1 minute. As the topic I was covering, which was the study of sleep cycles and how they could be applied to my partner's weekend experience, was fairly complicated I had to choose my works carefully in order to deliver the pitch within the time limit of 1 minute while also explaining all the smaller aspects of the study and how exactly it would work with my partner.

How did you use or develop or grow your 5 C's?

This activity enhanced both our abilities for divergent thinking and also the aspect of Communication, as we had to communicate and work as a team to be able to produce as many ideas as possible. This served as the start of our spin-off project and gave us some ideas and pathways that we could follow down later.

The activity started with a quick brainstorm of multiple ideas to test our divergent thinking, in which you create multiple individual ideas that are initially random and unconnected. We were handed a sheet of paper containing 30 small circles on it, each of which had to be filled by a unique design of a kind of recognisable object.

After we did this, we then moved onto convergent thinking. We partnered up and combined a random circle from each of our papers into a product that used aspects from both circles. I chose the circle which I had turned into a lemon, and my partner chose a fan. From this, we began to brainstorm some ideas that made use of these. Our first idea was a kind of pepper spray that instead used lemon, which could also be repurposed as a refreshener. However, we went on to evolve this into a focused air refreshening fan that could both clean the air and cool you down on hot days along with the clean scent of lemon. We decided this as after emphatsizing, we realised that the hot temperatures of summer Australia were more likely to require a fan than a spray.

This is an example of convergent thinking, where you focus on one idea and develop it until it is ready for testing.

What persuasive techniques did you find most effective?

I found that using a mix of convergent and then divergent thinking when formulating ideas is quite an effective way to do a brainstorm. I will be sure to use this in the future if I ever have a mental block and need to come up with ideas quickly, by coming up with numerous short ideas to work out one that is good, before expanding on it and potentially combining it with other high potential ideas through convergent thinking.

My intial thought on the Spin Off Topic are that it is a collaborate activity that will enhance our capabilities of collaboration and communication. We are required to design a product that will solve a frequently occuring problem in our local community, also making us use Critical and Creative thinking to be able to produce a thoughtful and effective product.

What do we still need to know or find out?

I believe that we could still find out more or know more about how we will actually potentially design this product, taking into account lots of factors such as costs, materials, labor, and any other problems that the product would have in real life that we would need to solve. We could also have more information about the kind of marketing and advertising that we will need to provide for the product.

How can we find this information?

We could find this information by conducting extensive research on all the ways to create such a product, including looking up what kinds of materials we would need to use and how much they would cost, and seeing if a similar product has been designed before allowing us to improve on its previous potential flaws.

What is most intriguing about this topic?

Something I find intriguing about this topic is how we are meant to discern between scam callers or other numbers such as hospitals, schools or jobs, which a phone user might not neccessarily have saved contact in their phone right from the start. By filtering out unknown contacts, it is possible that blocking these numbers might come as an unwelcome side effect, so we will have to think of a way around this to improve our product to its fullest potential.

What am I most concerned about (either this topic or Spin Off in general)?

Something that I am concerned about with the direction our Spin Off topic is heading into is the potential logistics of the solution, as well as keeping it grounded in reality. For example, one of our proposed features that the app would include was to require a potential input for the 'reason of calling' that could then be picked up and analysed by the receive to determine if they had a legitimate cause or were simply wasting their time and effort. However, after doing some background research, we discovered that implementing such a feature in real life would be highly impractical, as it would involve creating an entirely new calling and messaging app which was outside of any realistic boundaries for the project, or making a collaboration with a popular calling company such as Apple themselves to implement our app as a built-in extension, which was also highly unlikely. With enough research and collaboration, our group should be able to outmaneuver these problems to deilver a satisfactory and feasible end product.

What presentation techniques where most effective?

By watching several examples of effective advertisements, we were able to determine some presentation techniques that could be effectively applied into our own advertisement in order to make it more persuasive. A key factor present in many of the example advertisements from larger real-life brands was humour, which would be applied to connect and relate to the viewer, incentivising them to look further into the product if they found that it was funny. As this was prevalent in many advertisements, it seems as if this is one of the most effective advertising technique and that we should find some way to incoporate it while doing future video editing.

How might this activity help with the larger Spin Off Topic?

The skills developed in this activity will go towards the creation of the Spin Off Topic pitch and how this might develop in the future. The main focus of today's activity, persuasive language, has large uses in public speaking and advertising, that we would especially use while marketing a product like in our Spin Off Topic. Using techniques like we used in this activity such as emotive language, hyperbole and call to action established a base of understanding from which we can now develop on in our Spin Off Topic, refining the speech with more time to create a truly compelling argument that would sway the audience. This relates to the capability of Communication, with Uses a range of strategies to effectively convey information.

Overall, this activity was designed to nuture our skills of Critical and Creative thinking as well as Collaboration in areas such as Actively participates to maintain a conversation with others and Demonstrates curiosity and inquires into the areas of interest in relation to the purpose while preparing us with core skills that we could apply to the similar INNOV8 project. Using the same topics and themes as were present in the INNOV8 main task, we were required to collaborate efficiently in order to quickly create a functional product that would also overcome several prompts and demands, mirroring the demands of customers in real life.

Eventually over the course of several lessons and discussions in the group chat, we decided to focus on the topic of learning to tackle bias and misinformation in media, particularly those that students would access for school projects. Since students such as us often had summatives involving writing convoluted research papers, it was a major problem that the internet nowadays is full of uncertainty and behind the scenes influence that could cause doubt and innacuracy when translated into our work. Being able to emphasise deeply with the problem as the target audience ourselves, we compiled several of our frustrations into the ideal app, which would be a crucial tool in the unley community to improve accuracy and clear up internet misinformation not only for students, but even adults with jobs too. Through extensive discussion and compromising in the area of Communication and Collaboration with Committing to Purpose, we eventually came to an agreement that everyone was happy with. This would then let us continue forwards in developing our project with much less disputes and confusion.

Our first activity as a group was to test our skills in Critical and Creative thinking, as a sort of mini version of what we would later start for the main INNOV8 project. We were pitted with another group from across the neighbouring class and given a 'silly' topic that we were required to ideate a solution for something normally considered nonsensical, before presenting it to the entire two combined classes in an engaging manner to win over the other team. The topic that my group received was the 'left handed pencil'. Although this seemed strange at first, after some brainstorming we came up with the idea of a pencil that would simulate the normal grip of the right hand around the left when holding it, allowing right-handed people to use their left hand to write with ease. This would come in handy if your right hand was impaired. With limited time to formulate a speech, we were then made to pitch in front of the class. I took initiative and volunteered as the main speaker for our group, where following some basic jotted-down notes I fillied in the gaps using Critical and Creative thinking to deliver the pitch. A vote was cast and our group was decided as the 'winner' of the round, showcasing evidence for my skills in the area of Acting with courage and confidence.

What tools, skills or activities did you find most useful in the redesign your partner’s weekend activity?

An activity that I found useful in redesigning my partner's weekend frustration was the empathy map that we were required to fill in. It had multiple categories that prompted us to think about and relate to their struggle, allowing us to read it and find a good solution that met all of their requirements. This required the skill of empathising and understanding my partner's situation, including their thoughts, feelings, context and past experiences.

How did you use or develop or grow your 5 C’s?

In this activity, I mainly developed my skills in the areas of Collaboration and Communication. For collaboration, as this was a partner task and we were to solve a problem of theirs we were required to deeply connect and emphathise with them to move on, testing our ability to work together and in harmony.

For communication, as this was an oral assignment where we had to pitch to the class we had to make a speech that would be engaging, explain all the terms and ideas properly, and end within the 1 minute time limit, before being able to communicate properly to the class with good speaking volume, eye contact, and pace.

I believe an aspect that our group performed successfully in the Spinoff project was in group discussions and assigning roles for out of school work. As mentioned previously, we made efficient use of each lesson to figure out what work we needed to complete, and then divide roles equally so that everyone did a fair share of the work, checking in to make sure that we were all on track to completing our parts. We had no disagreements over who would do what, as being a group we understood that everyone would have to put in their own share of work in order to keep the project going successfully.

What Persuasive Techniques did we use? How effective were these? What evidence do I have of this?

We first discussed what kinds of techniques that we should include in the video, with reference to the previous lesson where we viewed some brand advertisements and noted the persuasive techniques used in those, deciding to focus on using statistics, accompanying videos and images, some humour, and a call to action. While I discussed the potentiality of looking up unknown numbers online to see if they were legitimate or not, I used my own phone as an example, taking one of my most recent unkown number calls before searching it up on google in a side by side presentation with my own speaking. This allowed the viewers not only to hear the basic words that I was saying, but also understand what it could look like and connect to it deeper with the crucial aid of visuals. This was an effective use of technique as was stated by several peers that I received feedback from, stating that it was a part of the advertisement that stood out to them.

What improvements would we make if we had the opportunity to do the task again?

If we were to repeat this task again, an area of improvement that I believe I could focus on for the capabiliy of Communication would be ensuring communication with group members not only in class but also while completing indepedent work out of school. This falls under the area of Engaging in Conversation. Although we made sure to have group meetups and discussions while we were all present, this was not frequent outside of the classroom as we did not have contact with each other with any social media or such. Because of this, there were some misunderstandings with the work that would not be able to be clarified by the group when recouperating with the class. An example of this would be with the video editing, as since filming took up a good part of the lesson we did not have the time to figure out who was going to do what, and with no out of school communication we lost up to two days of potential editing out of confusion only a couple days before the due date, leading to unwanted stress and anxiety. To improve this, next time with a simialr project I believe that by the very first lesson of working out groups it is reccomended to establish some means of a group chat that can be used for helpful communication so as to make work more efficient out of school.

So far, I have been introduced to the general structure and doings of AP, including divergent and convergent thinking. These ideas have given me food for thought towards the different ways I should act when solving problems, taking into mind the pros and cons of each one.

What do you think your biggest challenges are going to be in AP?

I think that my biggest challenge in AP is going to be working to collaborate with many peolpe that I have never interacted with before, especially in the upcoming variation assignment.

What are you most excited about in AP?

I am most excited to be able to develop a creative marketing pitch for the Week 8 Expo, drawing from previous exprience with similar projects such as the LEAP $20 Boss assignment. This intrigues me as I have always liked designing and creating solutions for various challenges and working through creative problems alongside my teammates.

What about your personality do you think will help or challenge you in AP?

I believe that my leading and creative personality will help me succeed in AP as it will give me the necessary skills to develop innovative solutions in the various projects. However, this could prove to be a challenge as not knowing many people in this class, I might not be able to fully take place as a leader.

An aspects of presentation that I liked in other groups was their interactivity with the audience. For example, many groups opening with a question such as "Who here has done x?", prompting the audience to respond and authentically engage with their speaking. As well as this, some groups had physical demos, like a small 3D print that was passed around the room for the audience to look at as well as larger demos that showcased what the product might look like as an early concept. These helped to engage and capture the audience's attention, as well as helping them get to know the product more. I think that to enhance our presentation, we could have also incorporated some of these aspects, although it might have been difficult to create a passable demo considering that our project is web-based.

What aspects did you see in other groups presentation that were less successful?

An aspect of presentation that I thought was less successful was the use of Artificial Intelligence, which many groups used. They would primarily use AI to create images and visuals for their products, which is somewhat understandable considering the limited time frame to build an actual demo. Despite this, the use of AI made their presentations seem less professinonal and rushed, disconnecting the audience from their presentation. To avoid this, my group attempted to be as independent and authentic as possible by creating all of our own graphics through Powerpoint and Canva, which I believed helped us seem more professional and dedicated to our work. Because of this, we were also able to create animated demos that consistently showed what our product would look like as well as providing a base for future developments.

What were the really great ideas?

Some good ideas that I saw included an aerated water showerhead that would increase the water efficiency of showers to reduce the water waste that goes on in our neighbourhoods. They also had a working demo to go along with this, which I thought was quite effective in communicating their point. Another group that I thought was effective would be the group that developed an automatic sorting bin that would seperate landfill, organic waste, and more using an AI scanner. Although this is not the most original idea, I thought it was interesting how they made a 3D model of their product so that we could view it with more detail.

Although I thought that we went quite well, we were also able to receive some feedback from our teacher assessors. For one, while many groups struggled with finishing both of their full pitches in time, on the other hand we found that our pitch was actually too short - only around 2 or 3 minutes in total. This might have been caused because of stress causing us to speak fast, as we did not encounter this problem while speaking. In the final INNOV8 pitch, our group will make sure to time our pitch thoroughly and account for external factors to make sure that we can convey as much information as we can while still remaining within the time limit.

Another piece of feedback that we received was to have less words on our page and replace them with more supporting visuals. Although we mainly tried to minimise the amount of words on our slide, this might have happened as while we were displaying our demos we brought up articles that naturally had a lot of text on them as well as our extension that had multiple parts to it, which could have been confusing or too long for the audience to read in the short amount of time that they were on screen. Although for this activity we were constrained by time limits preventing us from showcasing the demo fully, for the final INNOV8 pitch we are considering having working demos out for use that viewers can test out and read at their own time.

Which of the 5C's do you feel you and your group struggled with the most? Why is this and what could do differently?

Although our group was generally able to collaborate very well, I feel like the 5C that we struggled with the most would be Citizenship. Although we attempted to make our products as accessibe as possible, since they were mainly designed for researchers it is possible that we were not able to reach the global audience that we hoped for. We also were questioned about this by our assessors, who wondered if Scope would be accessible not just to researchers but also normal people just browsing articles. In the future, we could consider tweaking our target market so that it is more globally and demographically inclusive, as well as recognising this while desiging our marketing.

How has this task changed my way of thinking how I could brand and display my product?

Some prompts that we received included "creating a theme some for our product" or "showing how our product might look throughout time", which, while they did not neccessarily align with the style of presentation that we were aiming for with our pitch, they still helped us consider the different ways that we could design our stall layout and how to appeal to visitors, like by claiming the large screen in the middle to play an eyecatching animation..

Did you get any other ideas along your gallery walk with other students that you could extend uypon your inital stall thoughts?

Some ideas we saw were to have food and things that visitors could take away with them. We thought this was a good idea, as it would generate more advertising for our brand as well as providing some extra information that visitors could look over.

As well as this, we started designing an 'Elevator Pitch' for our product. This was supposed to be a concise, 60-second maximum pitch that would quickly convey to the viewer what our product was about and hook them in to listening to our more detailed explanation. To do this, we applied the feedback we received from our previous Marketing pitch by Giving and Recieving Feedback and made sure to put in persuasive techniques and memorised the pitch so that we would seem confident while presenting.

From there, we began to develop our brand identity and logo. We decided that being something to help with research, we should mainly use clean, sleek, shapes and simple colours. We experimented with the idea of a magnifying class and a scope to fit with our product name. Eventually, after many trials we eventually came up with a design that we were all happy with - a magnifying glass representing a question mark with its bar, as well as having a scope inside of this. I think that this logo represented our product very well and communicated what it was as well as looking good on a laptop screen. I helped to create a digital render of the logo in Canva, which we would be able to use for future marketing.

Our current general area that we are focusing on is difficulties in research and learning. Being students ourselves, an important part of our lives is knowing how to find accurate and reliable information on an online space filled with uncertainty. Our two products, Clarity and Scope, focus on different subcategories in this but still fall under the same general vision.

How is the use of the empathy map evolving our idea?

The use of the empathy map helped us to consider other points of view and the perspective of our users, forcing us to think about what constraints or needs they might have and design our product to be convenient to use for them

What new ideas or insights have you uncovered from this process?

From this, we came up with the idea of making our product into an extension rather than a website. Bias detecting functions already existed, but were slow and inconvenient to access. By catering for our audience's need for fast and efficient procressing as well as accuracy, we were able to make the change to an extension that would automatically scan your articles in the background and immediately pop up with all the required features during use.

How is our group collaborating? What can I do to improve collaboration within my team?

Our group is collaborating very well - we have set up a group chat so that we can comminicate and catch up on work after school, demonstrating Committing to Purpose, as well as delegating roles efficiently during lessons so that everyone is working to the best of their abilities and is satisfied with their output. I have taken on somewhat of a 'leader' role to push our team forwards, but to improve our collaboration I could consider stepping back and letting everyone share a more equal voice.

What barriers are we currently experiencing?

We are currently having trouble mainly with managing the tight timeframe of the task with the burden of work that we have. One of our main responsibilities is to hard-code a demo of our product, which is difficult and time-consuming. What are our next steps?

Our next steps are to finalise our script for the Marketing Pitch as well as creating slides that will play in the background and provide supporting visuals while we speak.

How has Action Project developed your understanding of the 5Cs?

Overall, I have gained some valuable entrepreneurship skills from this semester of Action Project. I had limited experience with designing products in the past, but now I have gained knowledge on design thinking and product ideation. These included coming up with a product, identifying a target market, applying effective presentation and communication techniques to convince viewers, and considering global-scale partnerships with related companies. By pitching to a real business CEO and receiving feedback for it, I have gained some insight into how the world of business and marketing operates.

How can you use the skills developed in Action Project in other areas of your life / in the future?

My communication has developed by improving my live talking skills, like memorising a pitch rather than reading off a script, using language that the audience can understand rather than technical jargon, and applying effective talking techniques to hook the audience’s attention.

My collaboration has developed by working with a team for a long period of time, as well as designating roles and responsibilities that have to be followed up on out of class.

My creativity has developed by opening my mind to the world of marketing products, by seeing the original ideas that I and my peers have come up with to solve problems in our society.

My critical thinking has developed by making effective judgements and actions under a limited time period, efficiently delivering an outcome to the best of my ability.

What challenges did you face in this course, and how did you overcome them?

In the future, I will make sure to consider all the feedback that I have received throughout this course, such as limiting the amount of words and background noise that is present as I am speaking to streamline the audience’s attention, creating working demos to hook the audience’s engagement and make us seem well-prepared and confident, and designing items like business cards and flyers that help us to advertise.

Were any of your personal Character Strengths a benefit or did you have to stretch your lesser strengths, explain how.

At the time of pitching the Expo, I was a little stressed, having months of build-up leading to this moment, but also confident in my own capabilities as a speaker like for Communication and Collaboration. I was definitely satisfied with the result that my team was able to achieve, and making it into the top 3 was a big relief and joy for me. My team and I made sure to put in the best effort that we could into delivering a thoughtful and genuine pitch, and since then I have been satisfied with the overall outcome that this course has had.

How have you developed as a learner throughout this course?

I can take some of the presentation techniques that I have learnt in this course to other subjects and activities. For example, in Debating, I would need to be proficient in talking on the spot, answering questions, and speaking with confidence and eye contact, all skills that I have been developing throughout this semester of Action Project.

What have you gained from this course at a personal level?

As an individual, I have learned that I am confident in speaking and marketing to others, that I can take a role as a driver of the team, and that so long as I work hard enough I have the potential to impress even those in high-up positions.