Blog

REFLECTION #1 (08/06/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? What adjectives would you use to describe your feelings toward your work? We have had a productive session today, we are still completing our interviews but have some very helpful information so far. We have been Productive, Professional and Purposeful.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We have learnt someways our users cop with epilepsy which have been very helpful, some skills we have acquired are being able to successfully interview someone,.

3. How can you improve your work? Keeping our booklet and website updated is quite hard so we think that putting the time into these to things is crucial to our end of year presentation.

4. What are you the most proud of? Our first interview was a great success we acquired some VERY helpful and valid information towards our topic.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? Learning about other people situations puts your own into perspective and I have learnt to be grateful to be happy and healthy.

6. What are you learning about other people? That peoples lives are very different from my own and live very different lives. Also that people are really helpful and willing to help us with our project. People have been really kind and making time to help us out.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? That it is important to all do your part in helping get everything done. Everyone has their own roles which are important. It's also important to help each other out and just work as a team.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? Setting up the interviews because it is very hard to organise them them when you don't know them. It was really hard to get all times and dates for the interviews as people are very busy.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? Talking to the people we interviewed because they were so helpful and great to talk to. They talked in depth about the questions we asked them and they were really nice which made it easy to talk to them.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Probably not because it's a bit of a hassle and not something I would usually do but the idea of it is pretty cool.

11. How could you build on this work in the future? With this information we can help spread awareness and hopefully promote our product. In the future we will be able to have a formal interview and use skills that we learnt about making people feel comfortable whilst being interviewed.

12. What are your next steps? Our next steps include finishing at least 5 other interviews, then defining the issue that we would focus on. Once finishing than we can ideate, and start brainstorming to find a solution in order to create our prototype.

13. How does something you learned connect to what you already knew? Previously we knew how to communicate with others to find information the interviews exposed us, to formally asking questions and having polite mannerisms in order to let the person being interview feel comfortable.

14. How did it extend your thinking further? With these new perspectives it taught us a lot about what we take for granted in life. It made us think about what we would feel like if we were in their shoes we would like to help as much as possible after coming to this realization.

15. What questions do you still have?/ What would you like to learn more about? We were given multiple pdf's with about every aspect of epilepsy and the struggles you would face. Questions that I still have is how emotionally do you cope with feeling powerless against epilepsy.

REFLECTION #2 (15/06/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? What adjectives would you use to describe your feelings toward your work? Today was a hard session because Hannah was away for the first half but we managed to catch up and create some very good ideas for our solution. I would describe our lesson as adaptive, productive and passionate.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We have learnt that even though we have some brilliant ideas and we have thought of everything for our app we are starting to realize that creating an app will be a challenge.

3. How can you improve your work? We have come up with multiple app ideas and were struggling to choose what one t go with but we have decided that we can incorporate all the ideas in one app to improve it.

4. What are you the most proud of? We are most proud of our ideas they all fit well together and this app can literally be used by anyone, like people with epilepsy, family and friends of people with epilepsy and people who just want to learn about it. We truly believe our app can and will make a difference.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? We are finding out how passionate we really are about this topic. At the start we were all a bit scared to face this huge process but we are now starting to get the hang of it and see the big picture.

6. What are you learning about other people? We are learning how much epilepsy can really effect you, but the longer you have it the better you can cope with it. We are also learning from all the people we interviewed and epilepsy experts.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? We are learning that in order to succeed we must all do our part and that when we are all passionate about the same thing teamwork just comes naturally.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? The hardest part is trying too adapt when people from your group aren't there, but we managed.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? The easing part was coming up with ideas because we had no shortage of them, and we also had very similar ideas.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Yes, but probably not to this extent due to outside commitments.

11. How could you build on this work in the future? Developing our ideas more, creating more descriptive plans and putting all our hard work into action.

12. What are your next steps? To develop our ideas and get feedback.

13. How does something you learned connect to what you already knew? More about the monitoring and how high heart rates can cause seizures.

14. How did it extend your thinking further? We know that the monitoring will be a very vital part to ur app and that we will definitely include it.

15. What questions do you still have?/ What would you like to learn more about? Our next challenge is creating an app, for example how to do it.

REFLECTION #3 (30/06/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? What adjectives would you use to describe your feelings toward your work? We have had a uplifting session today, we were meant to be getting feedback for our ideas and majority of it was positive and we had little no criticism. Which can be in some ways counter-productive.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We have learnt about what are next steps are going to be, and our multiple step process to build our app.

3. How can you improve your work? Staying on task and getting tasks done efficiently, whilst putting in 100% percent amount of effort.

4. What are you the most proud of? Our idea really. We have though out all aspects of the problems within epilepsy.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? Personally I am learning about my willingness to achieve a goal, everyone is saying building the app is going to be quite hard, in my mind building the app will take time but we will do it.

6. What are you learning about other people? I am learning a lot about the people surrounded by Epilepsy and the daily struggles they have to go through, which is helpful because we can add this in our product.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? Communication and being open minded are two extremely large parts of being a cooperative, successful team.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? So far the hardest part is criticizing our own idea to improve it for the better.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? Idealization. From the interviews and all the information we learnt, it opened the door to so many ideas and possibilities.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Yes, certainly I personally love learning new skills and any chance to expand my knowledge I would take, I cannot wait to learn how to build an app.

11. How could you build on this work in the future? With this information we can help spread awareness and hopefully promote our product. Possibly we would also be more familiar with how to build an app and possibly update it and make it even better.

12. What are your next steps? Our next steps and probably learning how to code, in order to actually create our app.

13. How does something you learned connect to what you already knew? Previously we had been familiar with technology and how to code but, building an app now is going to be a new difficult task.

14. How did it extend your thinking further? It extended our thinking by not letting boundaries of knowledge contract our ideas, we have an idea it is tricky to create but it's not impossible.

15. What questions do you still have?/ What would you like to learn more about? I would like to know more about advertising our app.

REFLECTION #4 (20/07/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? What adjectives would you use to describe your feelings toward your work? Excited, Hopeful and promising we are confident with our idea.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We learned how our apps going to come together and had a really in depth discussion about the concepts and ideas.

3. How can you improve your work? We cant, its so good already.

4. What are you the most proud of? Our in depth ideas and plan for our idea.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? That we are actually organised and that we work very well together.

6. What are you learning about other people? That the more people there is the more point of views we have a the better we can develop our app.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? To listen to their idea because they are key aspects.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? The hardest thing for us is people being away at music lessons or being sick because obviously its harder when there is only one person there to do the work.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? Communication, we can easily get our ideas across and express opinions and concerns.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Yes, planning is a big part of life and is usually a necessity.

11. How could you build on this work in the future? Developing our ides more and putting them into action by creating the app in real life.

12. What are your next steps? Creating the app by going off our plan.

13. How does something you learned connect to what you already knew? We were told the planning was compulsory, we already knew this.

14. How did it extend your thinking further? we were faced with small inconveniences that we were able to fix along the way.

15. What questions do you still have?/ What would you like to learn more about? How to code an app and is it even relevant to creating an app.

REFLECTION #5 (03/08/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? What adjectives would you use to describe your feelings toward your work? Productive, excited, nervous.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We learnt that feedback plays a huge part in what our final outcome will be and that we don't actually have much time so every session counts!

3. How can you improve your work? We can improve our work by using all of our feedback and changing our product along the way for the better. We need to use all of our time wisely.

4. What are you the most proud of? That most people are saying that our app plans look great and that they think it will make a difference.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? We are learning that even the smallest acts and high school kids can make a difference.

6. What are you learning about other people? We are learning that getting everyone's ideas are key to a successful product.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? I am learning that we all need to take each others ideas and perspectives into consideration when discussing things. To create a good final product we need to work together and make sure that everyone is heard and is getting a chance to contribute.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? The hardest part for me was that there are a lot of times where members of our group would be away or have other commitments such as music that we had to go to. This has made it quite hard for us to work together and get things done.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? Talking about our app and our ideas was really easy for us because we have done so much research and planning for our app and we are all really passionate about this project. We made a video explaining our app and although we did write a script we felt afterwards that we probably didn't need it as we put a lot of effort and time into our planning and research so we knew exactly what we were talking about.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? In the past I haven't done anything like this in my spare time much, but I would love to start doing it.

11. How could you build on this work in the future?Spread awareness about epilepsy by advertising ourselves on the epilepsy community Facebook page. .

12. What are your next steps? Using the feedback we got and to make a final design of our app.

14. How did it extend your thinking further We have had to learn how to use multiple different apps to create our design of our app.

15. What questions do you still have?/ What would you like to learn more about how to successfully make our app accessible to everyone.

REFLECTION #6 (11/08/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? What adjectives would you use to describe your feelings toward your work? Our lesson today was really productive as we got lots done and have we have a promising prototype for our design being done.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We learnt what our app and the design for it will look like and how we are possibly going to put it all together. We have started on our final prototype for our app so we have had to learn how to make a professional prototype that will work well and display our app design clearly to users.

3. How can you improve your work? I think our group is doing really good at the moment but sending out information to our users is really helpful so if we do more of that it would really help our work.

4. What are you the most proud of? That our group has a really amazing prototype for our design and that other groups have been saying how good our website is.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? We are learning that when we work together and collaborate on our tasks that we can accomplish really great things and be really successful with our work

6. What are you learning about other people? We are learning that everyone can contribute towards our final prototype and that we all need to put in equal amounts of effort to help each other.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? We are learning that having as much input and information from others as we get can really help in contributing to our work. The more feedback we get from others, the more we can consider to put into our design

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? The hardest part this week was trying to finish up on our reflections and getting our blog post done for the 123 Tech website

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? The easiest part for this lesson was developing our app and prototype because we are getting more familiar with it

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? I think this would be really cool to do in spare time, creating an app is really fun and even though it is quite challenging it's really fun to do

11. How could you build on this work in the future? We are learning how develop our ideas and design a prototype which could be really helpful for the future

12. What are your next steps? Finishing our final prototype and completing the reflection documents as we go along each week

14. How did it extend your thinking further? We had to think about how we are going to create a prototype and what was the best way to it

15. What questions do you still have?/ What would you like to learn more about? We would like to learn how to make our app

REFLECTION #7 (17/08/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? We worked very well especially because of lock down. We had a video call to discuss our prototype and feedback. Over all we were very productive and worked well.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We are starting to see our app come together which is great. We are learning that problems will pop up along the way and that we just have to deal with them as we go, due to lock down.

3. How can you improve your work? We can improve our work by sending out our video explaining our app because then we can get feedback, to improve our app.

4. What are you the most proud of? We are very proud of the way our app is looking so far, we are starting to see it come together and it is looking amazing.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? We are learning that even the smallest acts and high school kids can make a difference.

6. What are you learning about other people? We are learning that feedback is key and we need to deal with small problems along the way.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? We are learning that because we are all passionate about the same thing it is very easy to work well together.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? The hardest part has definitely been lock down because we can't talk face to face but we are adjusting and continuing our final product.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? We are finding it easier to deal with lock down because we have done it before.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Yes definitely, making an app is fun and very creative.

11. How could you build on this work in the future? Any problems we face we can create a solution if we put our minds to it.

12. What are your next steps? Developing our app further.

14. How did it extend your thinking further? We have had to learn how to use multiple different apps to create our design of our app.

15. What questions do you still have? How are we gong to code our virtual garden.

REFLECTION #8 (25/08/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? We were productive in doing our blog on 123Tech and designing our final prototype.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We are seeing our app come together and we are learning to work collaboratively on our blogs and reflections

3. How can you improve your work? I think our group is working well

4. What are you the most proud of? We are most proud of our app as it is looking really professional and is working good so far.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? We are learning that even though these may be small actions they can lead to big things and help others

6. What are you learning about other people? We are learning that people's feedback and opinions are very important in our process to design our product.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? We are learning that everyone is working hard and doing their part to help with our project and being on track working towards our deadlines.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? During lock down it is a bit harder to communicate and work together as we are not in the same place

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? We are finding it easy to all do our own tasks but help each other with them

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Yes, writing the blogs and designing the app has been really fun

11. How could you build on this work in the future? We can use the skills we are learning to help us problem solve in the future

12. What are your next steps? Finishing our final prototype and making sure our booklets are up to date

14. How did it extend your thinking further? We are having to learn new skills to design our app

15. What questions do you still have? How we are going to code our virtual garden on our app

REFLECTION #9 (31/08/2020)

1. How do you feel about your work today/ so far? Our app is starting to come together very nicely and we are starting to see what the final product will look like. We are very happy.

2. What did you learn today/ so far? Describe any new skills or concepts you acquired. We did find it hard hard during lock down but worked through to and we are now very pleased with where we are at. This shows perseverance.

3. How can you improve your work? We probably need to pick up the pace a bit to finish before the deadline.

4. What are you the most proud of? Our app.

5. What are you learning about yourself based upon this experience? We are learning just how passionate we are about it.

6. What are you learning about other people? We are learning that we work well together.

7. What are you learning about how to work with other people? that all ideas are needed and that we just need to use each others strength.

8. What part was the hardest for you? Why? Lock down and music lessons. We only have 3 people in our group and we need everyone.

9. What part was the easiest for you? Why? Coming up with ideas because we know what we want to do.

10. Would you do something similar to this in your free time? Why or why not? Definitely designing an app is very fun.

11. How could you build on this work in the future? Speeding up to finish on time.

12. What are your next steps? Finishing our app.

14. How did it extend your thinking further? Using different programs to make our app.

15. What questions do you still have? How are we gong to code our virtual garden.

Reflection #10 (8/09/20)

Today we meet with our Industry Mentor and showed her our prototype for our app. She was really impressed by our design and said it was definitely a project we should continue working on. She asked if how we came up with idea for our project and whether there was already something like it out there. She asked us lots of good questions and we got to explain our prototype really well to her. Her advice to us was to keep testing our prototype with our users and to get lots of feedback for our final design. She gave us some recommendations of apps to develop our actual app.

Reflection #11 (14/09/20)

We had a very productive session today, we managed to write scripts for the video involving our app. These videos will be shown when you first log into our app and they will help explain what you need to do to get the most out of our app. We were reminded today that our prototypes must be finished before next Friday, this really made us speed things up, we have almost finished our app so then we can get so feedback to change it where necessary. Our next step is to obviously finish our prototype and then do our evaluation. We are heading in the right direction and we are definitely seeing our app come together.

Reflection #12 (22/09/20)

Final Reflection/Evaluation

PROJECT NAME: EpilepZ

TEAM NAME: STEAM 9

TEAM MEMBERS: Bree Souster, Hannah Richardson, Paris Headford

SCHOOL: Westlake Girls’ High School

WHAT YOUR PROJECT WAS AND WHY YOU CHOSE IT?

Hannah’s father has suffered from Epilepsy all his life. He was diagnosed with a type of Epilepsy called Grandmal at the age of three. As I am getting older I have started to notice how it affects him and it pains me to see such a strong, inspiring figure in my life suffer. Community projects were when the ideas stemmed, we started to research and contact the New Zealand Epilepsy foundation. We met an amazing woman named Lynn who connected us with other people with Epilepsy. We had numerous interviews, and reviewed other products in the market. We realized that people all across the world suffered from the unrecognized effects of Epilepsy. Epilepsy was dismissed because there was medication to stop seizures, the medication preserves life but, it also affects the quality of life. Nobody seemed to know the true mental toll Epilepsy puts on a person. We decided to create an app that is accessible to everyone. The app has three main components, the awareness side, monitoring side and mental health side. The app tells people when they will have a seizure, when to take their medication, there are games, music and meditation courses to help people relax and there is a way to connect with other people with epilepsy. All their progress will be tracked in their virtual garden.

We met with numerous people with Epilepsy, but the most impactful interviews were by my father and Hana. Hana is a lovely girl who is only a couple of years older than us. She was inspirational. She previously had leukemia which led to her getting Epilepsy. She lives everyday with someone constantly by her side, she never gets to experience freedom and make mistakes and have fun like normal teenagers would. Hana helped us uncover the truth of Epilepsy. The medication she was taking helped her not have seizures but she often felt sick and tired. Seizures are scary and you don’t know if you are ever going to stop, you are not in control and for her she should not even speak afterwards. She was one of our prime inspirations, we really wanted to help her. My father has been living with Epilepsy his whole life and has learned to deal with it. Yet, I see him struggle and have bad days, he is so smart like a really high IQ smart but, the second people find out he has Epilepsy everything changes. He is no longer smart, he is disabled and slower than everyone else. My dad was the inspiration for the awareness side of things, he had dealt with stereotypes his whole life and told that Epilepsy is not serious. He refused to disclose this information because of the prejudiced views in society. Both of these amazing human beings inspired the mental side of things, this is extremely important because no other device or product helps with this.

WHAT CHALLENGES DID YOU FACE AND HOW DID YOU RESOLVE THEM?

We faced multiple challenges along the way that we had to power through the main problem being COVID-19 interrupting our school and being able to collaborate face to face. This was a very big struggle as we were so used to being able to easily discuss our ideas together but in lockdown we had to call each other facetime. However with wifi issues and broken mics this wasn’t as easy as it seemed but we made it work and kept to our timelines and once we got back to school everything synced up. Continuing our prototype at home was a great decision and meant that we were on track to finish on time. Music lessons also frequently interrupted our precious community project time but we managed to reschedule these so that we were finally all able to successfully work together. This was very helpful land meant we got more done, we started to see our final prototype come together.

There were also quite a few issues involved with the coding of our app, like glitches and learning how to use the program. To get rid of as many glitches as we could we did things like reprogramming our app and trying different methods. It was a long process but we started to see the results in our app. We also wanted to use a well known, good quality app designing tool. This tool ended up being Adobe XD it took us quite a while to get used to using the program which was a bit of a challenge but we can safely say that by the end of the prototyping process that we are pros.

WHICH PART OF THE PROJECT EXCITED YOU THE MOST? WHY?

We can say with absolute certainty that the best part of this process is being able to create our app. We knew what we needed to do and how to do the next step was just to put our ideas into action. We played around with pictures, colours, formats and ideas to come up with the perfect design. After hours of this we finally started to see our app come together with functional buttons and alerts. The best part of this was definitely the creativity, being given a white screen and told we can do whatever we want really made our creativity blossom which was a key part in designing our app. Although behind the scenes we knew that all this can and will help people which is obviously the main reason we started all this and the reason we love it so much.

WAS YOUR PROJECT SUCCESSFUL? HOW DO YOU KNOW?

Yes our project was very successful. Even though we had many challenges along the way, we managed to work together to design and create a successful prototype. We found a gap in the market when looking at existing solutions for coping with Epilepsy. We noticed how there were many products to help prevent seizures and medication to cope with Epilepsy. However, we saw that many of these products were either really expensive or only available in certain countries. This sparked the idea to create a solution which would focus on the awareness side, monitoring side and mental health side of Epilepsy. Our app is free and easy to use which makes it a great and successful product. We spent a long time discussing our ideas and getting feedback from our users and others. Quarantine threw a massive curve ball at our community projects process as it was a struggle to communicate over calls. However, the three of us worked through it and continued to discuss ideas for our project and how we could produce a product that would help our users. Now we have created a finished prototype, that we have collected feedback on, tested, refined and finalized. We have received responses from project mentors and users on our prototype and we’re very pleased. Both our responses have mentioned how our app could help many people who suffer from Epilepsy, know people with epilepsy or people who simply want to learn more about epilepsy. We are all extremely happy with the outcome of this project as we have all worked extremely hard and hope that it can make a difference in our community.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT ABOUT DEVELOPING A DIGITAL SOLUTION?

The digital solution was one of the most exciting aspects of this journey. I was in charge of creating the prototype and my group and I loved every minute of it, it was beautiful to see our ideas come alive. Learning about the program to make the app took about a week, and we started graphic designing almost immediately. I only had this paper design of our app, so my hardest challenge was transforming this into a real app design. I researched a lot of different layouts that we could base our app off. The designing part was really fun and I really enjoyed playing with the graphics. The prototyping was the tricky part, I had to figure out how the app was going to flow. I used different techniques such as; dragging the screen, tapping to open things and voice command. I have learnt a significant amount about graphic design and how to use different software's.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN ABOUT NEXT?

We would really like to learn more about how to properly code our app and getting it ready for people to use it. Being able to get our app out there would be really great to see. Getting an understanding of how to advertise our app would be helpful as well. Considering our limited time, we were not able to code an actual app with all our features and aspects of our prototype. Instead, we used an app designing program so we could put together and visualize our app. This was sometimes difficult as trying to add in some of our features we had designed was a challenge. If we properly coded and created a functioning app for people with Epilepsy to use, it could help many people. Hopefully we get the opportunity to do this as it could make a huge difference in our community. We hope to gain knowledge of how to code our app and market it for people to use.