This lesson we learnt that our previous Spinoff Project was cancelled and we were introduced to our new task. We actually started with an interactive activity where we tried to remember our transition day. By doing this we also tried to remember how we felt and what were some problems we faced. We identified what were some problems we faced and how we could possibly solve them. A big problem we discussed was getting lost or attempting not to get lost. We then wrote down all our ideas on the big post-it note, a lot of things we came up with were socialising and finding classes. After we had written whatever ideas we could get, we then started rotating groups and looking at other groups' ideas. When looking at other people’s posters we commented on ideas that would work and what could present a problem and what could be a problem. This gave us the opportunity to see other ideas that could work and how people work. This lesson gave me the opportunity to reflect on the Year 8 transition day and how we could solve the problems we faced. The aim of the lesson was to come up with ideas that could make Year 8 Transition Day smoother and easier. 

During this lesson, we shortlisted our top three issues that our group thought were a big problem on Transition Day. We chose getting lost, missing transition day and having trouble adjusting to a newer and bigger environment. Our issue was that it is hard for students to adjust to the new school environment with so many students, especially if coming from a smaller primary school. We found that this was the biggest problem out of the three and really hindered Year 8’s first experience of high school. After this, we started working on our pitch for Friday. What I learnt from this lesson was that when solving a problem, don’t just jump to the first solution. You have to follow a process, where you pitch your idea, then research if it is an issue faced. Finally using data from the research you have to develop a solution. We all started thinking about maps as our first solution would be maps. So we have to learn to think outside of the square and follow the process of designing a solution to the problem.

During this lesson, we presented our pitches for our Spinoff task. We had two minutes to present our problem, the process and the solution we would come up with. We made a basic outline of what our pitch was, we tried to be clear and concise in how we presented our pitch. We also wrote constructive feedback for each group that presented their pitch. While discussing our feedback, something we learnt was how to phrase constructive feedback without sounding harsh. We learnt to use the phrase “You did this … well,  and you could’ve done this …”. This was a more positive approach to giving feedback. Another lesson I learnt was that while delivering our pitch, our pitch doesn’t need to be lengthy, we just needed to get our idea out there and make it sound interesting. From this lesson I learnt that to present ideas to people they don’t need to be lengthy and descriptive, they just have to be concise and get the point across creatively. 

During this lesson, the remaining groups presented their pitches. After all the pitches were presented, we were given feedback, which included being clear with the purpose of our pitch. Something which we learnt during the directions task. After this, we were challenged by the teachers to take up the curriculum issue, that our group took up. We took up the challenge, and we decided to solve the issue by having a day where we just got to do activities that were fun, educational and inspiring, some ideas could be karate, leadership activities, learning a new instrument. We then had to rethink our whole planning as we were back to square one though we will be able to catch up as we have got some basic idea about our solution. Something that I learnt this lesson was the importance of giving clear and intentional directions. Something I learnt this lesson was taking risks and going out of your comfort zones is a rewarding experience. 

In this lesson, we started off by writing down our issue, solution and process again, as we had changed our idea in the previous lesson. After we had written down our issue which is that Year 8’s and Year 7’s often miss some aspects of primary school and find it harder to adjust to high school. We then decided to send out surveys to year 8’s. We then filled out the NABC worksheet, while filling in this worksheet we also got some more clarity about our aim and solution with the Spinoff Project. We didn’t do much in the lesson as we were just planning. Something I learnt in this lesson was planning our research is very important, as we had to formulate our questions, send emails to the mentor group teacher and explain our aim so that they can explain the purpose of the quiz to their mentor group.

During this lesson, we got our survey results and began writing our script for our infomercial. We initially only had one response over the weekend, but we got 24 responses by our lesson. We then started collecting our data and tallying the answers. Our research said that approximately 40% of Year 8’s missed their primary School and 70% of them would support this day each week (practical life skills instead of lessons) if they got to pick your own activities/workshops. This helped us alter our solution, as we got input from Year 8’s about what they want. We then went outside and began filming our infomercial. Something I understood was the importance of research data, as we got data from the Year 8’s which made our solution more credible and plausible. 

During the first two lessons of the week we were just filming our infomercial and then just editing. We all equally contributed to the video and the script and everyone did their part. Our video could’ve been better but we weren’t sure how to edit our video, so we just compiled the video. During Friday’s lesson, we watched the other group’s infomercials and gave them feedback on their infomercial. For our video, we received feedback that our sound quality could be improved, something we could solve by doing voice overs in the video. Other feedback we received was that our idea was unique and our solution was detailed. Something we can consider in the future is that we add voiceover and text in our infomercial. We could also edit it better and have more stats in the video. A lot of this feedback could help us come up with a more convincing and improved infomercial. 

If we were to do the infomercial again, we would definitely do something about the sound quality as this was one of our greatest drawbacks. Some suggestions we received were filming outside or adding voice over to better the sound quality. We could also add subtitles or text to help emphasise our point and help the audience follow along with what we say. This hindered us from delivering our idea well. Another improvement we could make was using statistics we collected from our research to back up our problem and our proposed solution. We mentioned the data but never showed any graphs on the screen. We could also use visuals such as images and add voiceover instead of having us saying the script. Another improvement would be to add some background music to add some interest to our video.

This lesson was quite significant as we got allocated the final groups that we would do the Shark tank with. We were given our groups and the pseudo leaders. To get to know our groups better we did a task to break the ice with our team, in this task we were stuck on a desert island, and we had to order thirty items in importance. After we had done this as a group we then had to pick our top 10 that we would need on the island. We would then negotiate with another group to swap three items, when doing this we had to ensure that we got a fair deal, and only bought items that were advantageous for our group. We bartered for more canned vegetables and matches. This part of the exercise taught us to negotiate with others and how this could help us in the future, as we had to prioritise what we needed and swap for things that we didn’t need. 

This week had been quite stressful and since it was a Friday, everyone wasn’t in the greatest spirits, so we had a fun activity planned out. In this activity, we had to use 4 pieces of string and a rubber band to move cups and stack them in a tower formation. The aim was to create the highest tower. Our group managed to make a tower but it fell down quite a bit. Eventually, we managed to make our final tower but we didn’t win the challenge. One of the teams that had won had a very clever strategy, where they assessed how high the other teams’ towers were and decided if they wanted to take the risk of increasing their tower’s height. This was something we could use for our future, as keeping an eye on competitors and making our move accordingly would be something we would have to do as business owners. After this, we started learning the cup song, which many of us had forgotten and something I learnt was it is a lot harder than it looks. 

We began the lesson by talking about how prepared we were for online learning and what we could do to make our online learning more successful. We discussed explaining what we are doing, in terms of online learning to our parents so they could better understand how we are learning. We then went through the final assessment, which was the marketing pitch. We are going to be designing a product that we will pitch to a shark tank. This product could be anything we want and can have any target audience. We were advised to make our target audience very specific, as a way to design our product so it appeals to our target audience and meets their needs. We then decided on our groups for the task and got into our pairs. We got the planning grid that could help us decide the specifics of our product such as the target audience, stakeholders, objective and cost and revenue. This planner again reinforced that we need to carefully plan out each aspect of our product so that we can design it to be successful. 

This lesson was a very different lesson in terms of structure, as we discussed our ideas and planning for our shark tank project and we experimented with Google Meet and people who weren’t at school. We worked out how to video call our partners and teachers so we could work together online without having to be at school. We narrowed down some ideas from our local, national and global brainstorming attempted at deciding our inquiry question. I think this lesson was more to get everyone on the same page and begin finalising some ideas, by the next lesson I hope we have finalised our idea.

Due to self-isolation, I wasn’t at school today, so I used Google Meet for Action Project. After confirming our groups, we began brainstorming issues that people face locally, nationally and globally. During this lesson, we went through the issue of inquiry and what we could do to make our issue inquiry as productive as possible. We finalised our issue as food wastage for the wider community and other items that we often throw out such as furniture or clothes. We decided our issue was recycling items and food (donating) in good(edible food in terms of food) condition. We began working on the planning canvas and beginning our inquiry presentation. During this lesson, something I learnt was communicating virtually is an essential skill that we have to learn as it helps us, as we aren’t always faced to face. 

We spent the rest of the term making our pitch for our final shark tank idea. My partner and I decided to target food wastage and wastage of perfectly good things that could be used again. We decided that we would attempt to make donating old things and leftover food easier for people who were willing but weren’t sure how to proceed. We filled out a planner that came with the pitch. The planner helped us organise our ideas and ask the right questions about our issue. Something I’ve learnt throughout this semester has been that using planners to organise our ideas and research necessary information is really easy and useful. This way all the necessary information is in one place with the relevant topics. We decided to make a video for our pitch as we weren’t in the classroom. To make it easier we split up the tasks regarding the script and video amongst us and collaborated on the voiceovers. I was really happy with our pitch as we made a video online with visuals and voiceovers, despite not being able to communicate face to face. 

Today was our first lesson back from the holiday, though we were still online. To start off we did a fun activity with Sujan. We drew shapes as Sujan instructed us, though we did get confused through the process it was enjoying and challenging as he could show us how to draw. We online so it was harder to communicate with him at times but eventually, everyone got the hang of it and managed to finish the drawing. It turned out to be a camera. I really admired how Sujan was able to get all of us through the activity without having any teaching experience. We then split up into our groups and started discussing the next steps for our final product. We then decided to start working on our prototype. 

During these two lessons, we began working through our action project canvas. We decided that we would start planning for our marketing pitch. This would also help us with our prototype as we would know what to include in our prototype. Since our idea is n app, and we both have no idea about coding an app, we decided to use a website which designs app interfaces. We spent Wednesday filling our action project canvas. Some issues we found were how we would finance our idea and what the name and the logo of our idea was. The canvas was very helpful in working out the minor details about our product. During Friday’s lesson we finished filling out the planner and we also had a chat with the teachers about our idea and prototype. Some feedback and things to think about that we got were how to make sure the products being donated match our standards and how to verify if the person donating is genuine. We came up with a rating system similar to Uber where the person donating and the user both rate each other. This helps to verify the people donating and build relationships. We also decided to include a rewards system which would encourage people to donate more, this would be based on your rating and the number of items successfully donated. Using this feedback gave us some clarity about our product and prototype. 

During this lesson, we regrouped with the class and did some discussion about our issue inquiries and some roles that students from our class would hold in the shark tank committee. We then started regrouping with our partners, My partner, Tar and I began by just reading through our Action Project Canvas and our feedback. We looked through a few websites and finally settled on Pidoco and decided to design our prototype in class and work on our marketing pitch at home. We made this decision because most free app interface designing apps wouldn’t let users collaborate. To make designing our prototype easier we would do it in class so we could make improvements as we go. We would collaborate on the app interface while we will split up the marketing pitch. We spent the rest of the lesson exploring the website and what features it had. 

We had a very productive lesson as we first watched an example of what our marketing pitch should look like and discussed what we picked up from the vodcast and some wonderings we had. The example was very helpful in visualising how we could incorporate our prototype into our pitch. We then decided that making a logo and coming up with a product name was the first step to begin our marketing pitch. We used Looka to make our logo while coming up with names we were looking for something that was easy to say and was related to our slogan. In the end, we came up with ‘Donner’ which means to give in French. It is really easy to say and alliterates with our slogan. The name and slogan are ‘Donner; Decide, Donate, Deliver’. 

During this lesson, we presented our marketing pitch and idea withing one minute, this was just to know what others are doing in the class and get some feedback. The purpose fo this was to briefly talk about our product and the progress we had made so far. Though this time we were allowed a script. We got a lot of quality feedback back from the class such as how we would ensure the quality of the product, how we could help with the privacy of the poster and what about people who were using the app for the first time. Some of the feedback was very positive about our name as it was very much relevant to our cause, and how much it means to our mission. Something else we got from the feedback was how we can advertise our product, we would most probably use social media as a way of connecting with our users and making our product more accessible.  We also got to see other people’s feedback they received for their project, some of which we could use in ours such as the cost of our product and potential partners. This lesson also helped us refine our final product for our marketing pitch and give us some more questions to think about. 

We finished the last few 1-minute commercials, and then we all looked at our feedback and decided to incorporate into our plan. For us, it was designing our prototype and social media pages, as we have completed 60% of the research already. We planned on finishing our prototype by mid-week 4, giving us enough time to sort out our presentation, using the information from our canvas that we had already filled out. In terms of the privacy concern, we decided to use a similar approach as Facebook Marketplace, the app only showing an approximate location such as a suburb. The user can get in touch with the poster, who can choose who to give their address to. Another concern was the advertising, which again is related to our social media pages and our prototype. 

During this lesson, we designed our app on paper and started using a website to design our app interface. We also began filing in a website for our product, as the expo could be online meaning that our website would be very helpful for the parents who can surf through our website and learn about our product. We had a break in between to watch some videos from Shark Tank, where a group presented their idea to the shark tank and they bid on their ideas. All the groups were very confident about their product and were prepared to answer any questions that were thrown their way, even some unexpected ones. Something we could pick up from these videos would be to plan the details about our product to the smallest degree and be confident when answering questions. We had to organise dates by which we had to finish our prototype and website. We have to start planning for the expo and the shark tank and set up due dates for each part so that we have enough time to do final touch-ups. 

We spent the entire lesson designing our prototype, we had already started working on this, but we found the program we were using wasn’t very good. So we scrapped the entire prototype and started again by drawing our plans for the prototype. We were interrupted though due to vaccinations, we did end up losing half an hour due to vaccination. Something I realised during this lesson was that it was better to restart something, then continue with a bad version. We hadn’t done too much on our prototype so we scrapped for a better program we found that was much easier to use making it a time-saving. We aim to finish the prototype by Friday, Week 4.

This lesson was another independent lesson where we worked through our prototype. We planned to finish the prototype by the end of Week 4, the marketing pitch by the end of Week 5 and the website by Week 6. The reasoning for doing the website last being that our marketing pitch could help us fill in our website quicker. We continued working through the prototype and split the task up so we could get it done quicker. We finalised our designs for each page, we had decided that adding four pages were enough to display what our product would be like without actually building the app. 

I finally finished making my part of the app, I was doing 2 pages out of the 4, which were the homepage and the add page. My partner is also almost finished so we will be finished before Friday. We found out that we were presenting our marketing pitch to the shark tank on Wednesday, and that in addition to our website, we had to make a loom video to interest people and convince them to come to our website. We were given a planner for what we would need in the lead up to the Innov8-2020 Expo. This was very helpful for us, as we had an order of things to do beginning with our marketing pitch, loom video, our 30 seconds advertisement video and our website. We will begin filming and making our loom video and advertisement video after presenting our marketing pitch. The website will mostly contain the content from our marketing pitch, as they have similar purposes. 

During this lesson, we worked on finishing our marketing pitch since we had already finished our Canvas, we only had to convert the information into a Presentation. Our marketing pitch only had to be 3-5 minutes, so we had to only use the necessary information while covering all points. We worked on finishing our presentation using the example from a few lessons ago which gave us a good idea what our presentation had to be about. This example was very useful now that we actually had an idea what our marketing pitch was going to like. We plan on adding finishing touches to our script in tomorrow’s lesson and recording our presentation. Something I learnt from this was doing the canvas earlier did take longer but it paid off in the long run as we don’t have to stress about the marketing pitch.

We had managed to finish our script and presentation before the lesson so we just went through the presentation and script to make sure we had everything. The most challenging part of today’s lesson was that we couldn’t find a place to do our screen-cast-omatic. We tried in the humanities wing where too many people were moving about. We then went to the Sam Kellet Memorial but the audio wasn’t very clear due to the wind. We finally found a place near the PAC that was as quiet as we could find and managed to record our pitch. Although there were some interruptions we just had to ignore those as we couldn’t do anything about them. We just had to do it to the best of our abilities as we couldn’t control this so we just had to let go after one point. We finished our pitch, so we now have to make our loom video, 2-minute pitch and the website. 

The INNOV8 Expo was quite different from the previous years, as we had to do the expo online. This was quite different from what we were preparing to do. So we had to do a lot more work such as making a marketing pitch, a loom video, a thirty-second ad video and website. This meant we had to improve our time management skills since we had to do multiple pieces of work for action project. This is something that will be helpful for me in the future as time management is something I will need throughout my life. We had set up both our laptops and logged onto the zoom calls for the parents and the judges. Although we had a few technical glitches we finally logged onto both calls, but we were running behind schedule meaning that we were only able to have one judge view our pitch instead of the two we were allocated. 

I was quite disappointed with the results of the expo, as we had no parents logging on and had limited time to present to the judges. I wasn’t sure how the timetable and technology worked so my partner and I had to think critically about what we would present and how we would present it to the viewers. Before the expo, I had to collaborate with my partner and catch up on what we had done during the COVID-19 lockdown. I believe our group worked quite collaboratively because we had to do work at home and then share our progress and do our share of the work by the due date. Whilst collaborating, we had to come up with various ways of communicating and adapt to using different technologies such as Webex calls, meet calls, facetime and google docs, this was so we could discuss what we had to do and work together on one document so we could make the relevant changes. 

When we were presenting to our judge, I was feeling quite nervous but also excited that we finally had a viewer for our presentation. Eventually, I was glad about how we were about to present our video and how I was able to keep my nervousness at bay. We also wrote the questions and feedback we got from our judges so that if we got the same questions from our second judge, we could refer to them. I was also disappointed that we didn’t get to speak to a wider variety of judges as we got less feedback and exposure.

Overall, I think Action Project this semester taught me how to better manage my time, adapt to different situations and use my 4 C’s. Although the expo didn’t o as planned, maybe next time with better organistion and communication between the teachers will help improve the expo.