Welcome to your Advanced Maker Journal Personal Site! Here is where you are going to document your learning journey throughout the program. This Q&A guide will provide you with some tips on how to document your work .
A make-through is a process-oriented format of documentation, where you document all the steps that you went through in order to reach your objectives, including all successful and failed trials.
Make-throughs captures both successful and failed trials, thus it communicates the effort that goes into creating an artifact. Having space to showcase these efforts can be especially important in an educational setting like the Advanced Maker Diploma program, where problem-solving efforts are more important than the tangible output of a project.
The BACKGROUND section should provide a brief introduction about the project, your motivations, and goals.
The OBJECTIVE is a goal you are trying to achieve to fulfil the technical requirements of the assignment. For example: PCB Design, Programming...etc. Make sure to write down the Title of the OBJECTIVE in the headline.
While you were trying to achieve your OBJECTIVE you probably went through a number of unsuccessful Trials before you've done a successful Trial. You must include all trials, successful and unsuccessful, write all the steps and include all the design files, source code, schematics..etc. List all the Trials and their steps in chronological order
After writing any unsuccessful Trial, you need to write the Problem that might've caused that Trial to fail, and Potential Solution(s) that led you into the next Trial
The CONCLUSION section should provide a summary of your results, learnings, and future goals
You can think of the PROCESS MAP as the table of contents, it captures the headings automatically, so you won't need to edit it directly.
Be specific and descriptive while writing the OBJECTIVE and Trial headings as the PROCESS MAP is the first thing a reader would see when they read your make-through. Help the reader capture the whole story at a glance when they go through the PROCESS MAP
The sky is you limit! Documentation can serve as a venue for creative storytelling rather than prescriptive instructions. The documentation itself becomes a form of creative expression in which you can communicate your personal journey of creating a design.
Use the BACKGROUND section of your make-through to describe the setting where the events took place , describe characters, and explain motivations behind the week's story! For the weekly assignment, you are probably the main character of the story but you can also include other characters, a duck, for example!
Good stories are the ones that throw challenges in the hero's face, one after another, until s/he find the solution and save the world and everybody lives happily ever after! Does that sound familiar? This is exactly what happen while you design and develop your assignments, you face one problem after another, one failure after another, until you figure it out and find the solution, and you become the hero of your story! Use the Problems section to describe the road blocks that you faced, also describe how did you feel at the time? Feelings are essential elements of any story. In the Potential Solutions section describe the moment when you saw the light at the end of the tunnel; the clue that might have led you to achieving the OBJECTIVE.
Another way to make a make-through more fun is by using catchy visuals. One way of telling a story is by using stop motion technique. You may use an app to create a stop motion video and upload it to your site, or you can simply use Google Slides! Put one picture or screenshot per slide and adjust the playing speed of the slides and let the magic happen!