It'sThe Final Countdown

This week was really busy for our project and also the last. On Monday we met and worked hard to get a working product ready for the final meeting with our project partner.

Boxy little plan

We got things done pretty nicely and decided that the final report will be done outside of our meetings, with everyone having their designated part to write.

On Thursday morning we met again for NFO (New Factory Open) and built the box and brochures to show to the people there. Unfortunately there is not a clear picture of them available. We got some nice feedback from the people that visited our table, which was nice. All in all NFO was really nice with amazing speeches and friendly and open atmosphere.

Selling happiness in a box

On Friday we met with our project partners for the last time and presented everything we had worked so hard for these past three months. It felt good and I'm feeling optimistic about them licensing our plan. 

Final hours: Aku 98h, Helen 60h, Johanna 77.5h, Andres 61.5h and Tatiana 68.5h.

It was a pleasure to manage this project and I wish the best for everybody associated with us and our work!!!!

Keep Calm and Work Hard

Busy busy....the project is turning into a final race against time. Everyone is pushing to get the project finished in due time and I can assure you, there is a lot to do. But we are a team known to be extremely effective and we work very well under pressure.

On Monday we worked a long day to get the whole product to work as a holistic social marketing campaign that is ready to be presented at our Final Pitching event in Demola and also quite ready to be presented for our project partner in the Final Meeting.

The Final Pitching event was today and I must say that I am very proud of our team! I'm sure we had one of the best pitches of our patch so we are now exited to hear who are the 3 best pitches of Demola Spring 2015. We are at least a very strong candidate. And taking into consideration the journey of this project, I am even more proud of our team that we have been able to pull the project together and make it into something that can be pitched and sold.

Next week we have our work cut out for ourselves. We still need to develop the meters to measure the success of the product, come up with a questionnaire for the student, to translate everything we have done into Finnish, write the Final Report and sell the product and get it licensed. The majority of that should happen on next Monday pretty much and on Friday we have our Final Meeting with the project partner.

So..we know what to do, now we just have to do it!

Working on the campaign

This week we met two times to develop our campaign for teachers further. Last week the project partners informed us that the campaign is going to last 1-1.5 years for the first time, and then can be repeated or redesigned.  Moreover, they provided us with a publication that combines various statistics related to the lack of community at the universities in Finland. We decided that the exact figures that are based on the research should be used in our campaign to give a clearer picture of the current situation. We created four card sketches that will be used in the campaign. Each card starts with the question that will motivate teachers to interact with students more, promote the sense of scientific community, and, in general, be a better teacher. Besides, they contain conceptual images, statistics that will draw teachers’ attention and some solutions/suggestions related to the existing problems. We came up with the idea that the box, that includes an introduction letter and folded cards, will be delivered to each unit in the beginning of each period. In total there will be four boxes for four periods of the year.

Generating new ideas

Enjoying our results

Next week we are planning to improve the sketches and design the prototypes for the cards. The next step will be creating cards in the shape of triangle similar to those that are often placed in cafeterias of the campuses. These cards will represent our campaign to students. Also, next week there is the last pitching event where we’re going to show what we've done so far and the result we’re planning to achieve. It's great to see this project nearing the finish line!

Cumulative time consumption for this week: Aku 66.5h, Helen 58h, Tatiana 53.5h, Andres 55.5h and Johanna 50.5h.

Positivity is piercing

This week was really hectic for our project. We had a new angle and a direction, so we had to start almost from scratch, which is why decided to meet two times before the meeting with our project partner. This time we tried a new strategy and tried to do things more concretely, on paper. We made these huge poster-like things with ideas, plans and conceptual images in each one. Together they would make up the social marketing campaign with the goal of changing or influencing our teachers for the better. Down below you can see a glimpse of our creations.

 

Mr. two-face

Who am I?

Andres putting in the finest of work

Everybody hard at work, luckily there was coffee :)

Our project partner was really pleased with our work this time around! They said that we are finally really on the right track and suggested some improvement ideas and things we could or should focus on for the rest of the time we have to make this stuff pure gold. We are feeling pretty confident now about the project and I'm sure everyone will get something out of our end results.

Cumulative time consumption for this week: Aku 63h, Helen 56.5h, Tatiana 49h, Andres 54h and Johanna 48.5h.

Students & Professors

After the meeting with the Project partners, we are now focusing only on develop a campaign for the teachers and professors. Right now, all the effort is going to the creation of campaign where we can highly the role of the professors and teachers in the campus area, as we know, the professors are very important figures at the universities because they are the persons who give us the knowledge and help us to develop our skills in our professional life. At the same time we realize how important is for professors to know their students and let them realize who they are teaching for. On the other hand, is also important for students to know who is teaching them, is not only important someone with a lot of knowledge about different fields but also someone with passion and dedication of the teaching area using useful methodologies which help students to improve on their future.

In our meeting after the project partner session, we came out with different ideas about how to improve the relation between professors and students but the main point was to make the professors realize their role. First thing that came to our mind was the creation of a campaign which would help the professors to think about what kind of professors they are and how they think the students see them. At the same time we thought about a creation of a white wall where students could write short adjectives of how they see their professors. On the other hand we also thought about making a video showing interactions between professors and students, showing different perspective about how classes and interactions are. Finally other example of campaign is to build little cards promoting the importance of the relation and interaction between professors and students.

This week we will meet and we are going to decide which campaigns we are going to develop, the content of them and how we are going to do it.

The cumulative working hours this week were the following: Aku: 54, Helen; 46, Johanna: 42,5 Andrés: 50 Tatiana: 46

We finally found the path to follow!

This week was pretty stormy on the field of our project as we have been trying to figure out which path we should take and follow to finish the project successfully. It feels like we have been going round in circles as we have been stuck at brainstorming stage for a way too long. The project has faced many challenges during its relatively short life and as mentioned in the previous blog post we desire to implement changes that would really have an impact. Unfortunately our playing field is very restricted and for this reason we had to give up many ideas.

This week, however, we finally found the direction to go for. First we met on Wednesday to discuss further the ideas that had raised on the brainstorming session last week. Nevertheless the session felt like being helpful we agreed that the new ideas were not such that they would have strong impact considering the communality among students. We found ourselves questioning again whether those were the solutions we would like to develop further. After all we decided to give up with the idea of organizing games for students to play at campus and we focused our discussion on how to improve tutor trainings. We got some new perspectives to the problem and decided to present our ideas on partners' meeting on Friday.

On Friday we had again a fruitful discussion with the project partners who also showed some criticism towards our solutions. Our facilitator Aino showed up on a critical moment to challenge both us and the partners to think about what we really want to get out of this project. She also reminded us of the very limited period of time that is left before the project ends. It was good to have somebody to say it out loud to make everybody understand that we have to stop wandering around the problem and to choose one path to go.  

In the end of the partners' meeting we agreed that the new and the final approach to the problem will be the aim of building a sense of science community at campuses. We want to make students feel that they have an important role at the university and that everybody's contribution is needed to make significant science. Now we are just got to work hard to find solutions for how this sense of communality could be built up to able to finish the project in time.

We also met our responsible teacher Tero on Friday and I would say that I wish we met him before. He really got us to understand at what stage our project is now by asking questions about what we have done so far. By questioning our approach and the work we have done he made us understand that there is still a lot more to be done. Furthermore he gave us very good tips considering how we should spend the last month of the project period to get the most out of it.

The week was definitely not the easiest week so far but it was very significant considering the future of our project as it got us finally on the right track. There are still some challenges we need to cope with, for instance the problem of scheduling as our timetables seem to diverge strongly from each other and we should meet often from now on as we are running out of time. In any case it was nice to see that even though we are facing problems everybody seems to able to keep the spirit high. After the official part of the Friday meeting we had a nice lunch and free discussion together with the project group. We still trust each other and have belief in the project and that's why I believe that we will succeed in the end.

The cumulative working hours this week were the following: Aku: 51.5, Helen; 45, Johanna: 40, Andrés: 45.5, Tatiana: 43.5.

Pushing through..

We are beginning to reach the latter part of our project and in a about 5-6 weeks we should have a ready product to help the campuses become more close and communal. The team has worked hard to find solutions and we have come up with many kinds of ideas, some of them good and some of them not so good.

This week we met twice, first on Tuesday and again on Friday. On Tuesday we tried to deal with the project-partner meeting that we had on Friday. We found out that we most probably have to let go of one of our solutions on which we have worked for some time. The solution in itself is good but just hard to implement quickly and would require quite big arrangements to make it happen. Some of our social marketing ideas proved to be too costly for our project-partner so we are going to have to look for cheaper solutions. We weren't still ready to let go of some of our social marketing ideas but we are trying to find cheaper or free ways to make them happen.
On Tuesday we also tried to come up with some new ideas that we could start pondering upon. We came up with some ideas that we then could brainstorm better on Friday.

On Friday we asked our facilitator to help us again with brainstorming and she did brilliant job again. We thought of our new ideas and tried to refine them a bit further by asking questions after questions like: what, why, who, when, how etc. In the end we answered the questions and now we have some new perspectives which to elaborate on.

Some my own thoughts on the project is that I find it a bit frustrating that we don't have the necessary resources to execute good solutions. Right now I feel that we are dealing with quite superficial ideas and solutions and I'm afraid in the end they don't end up making a difference. We should be able to think bigger and deeper. Some of the biggest questions in my opinion would be: How can we make people to change their behavior into the direction that we want? How can we reach permanent change of behavior? Should we be able to change the structures that prevent communality from happening? If communality is created with good leadership, who are the people that we need to reach? Then the following question is: where can we find resources to implement bigger solutions?

I hope we will be able to push through so that the students will benefit from all our work in the end because they are the reason we are working hard for. But besides that I think this project has been very good experience of project-work and the nature of project-working. Especially when the solutions you're trying to reach is something more abstract in nature and not for example an app or a game or any solid product. Despite of the challenges and frustrations (which are natural parts of project-work) the team is still well motivated and keeping positive and we believe in the importance of what we are doing. We are sure that we will do well in the end!