#immt750

    The official last week of my internship has passed, and It is the time for my last blog post. It is hard to believe that a year has passed so quickly. On my last learning week, I wear working on my project, preparing for presentation and finishing my feedback on a course.

     On Monday Jon gave me additional information about the website and answered my questions. I got an opportunity to continue its work. I spend Tuesday creating Personas based on provided information. My next step is to create a use case scenarios. I assume that I can finish the entire project before the end of the first week of September.     

     On Wednesday, I was editing the video and preparing my speech for presentation. Unfortunately during my presentation, for some reason, the video played without sound. It distracted me, because  I was going to tell more about my daily routine and schedule, introduce my supervisor, and tell the story about me organising my working process at home, during the video.  But on the whole, I am satisfied with my performance. It was very interesting to listen to my classmate's presentations. I am glad that it was a good experience for everybody and many of them get work proposals after the end of their internships.

  On Friday, I translated my draft of Course reflection, but unfortunately was not be able to upload it on time, because my internet was not working for some reason. 

Week 10 - The final week! The whole week before the presentation was a blur of work, learning to code and making my final presentation. One of most important thing I learnt this week was to balance my responsibilities at work. Up until now I was more focused on design and could balance my work easily, but now that I have started to code - it is very difficult. You go into a certain mind frame when you start to code and do not like constant interruptions. But as Sleep Diary was in developing stage, there were some design needs that I had to oversee and the dev team would constantly need my  approval on certain changes and need assets. The balancing my mind between design and code was not easy but a great experience. 

The day of the presentation was approaching fast. I would read my script at least twice daily and still would not be sure if I can give a nice presentation. I got permission to do a voice over. During this time my office staff, especially my supervisor was very supportive. He let me work half a day on my presentation and gave feedback on it once I was done. I was excited to meet all my classmates again and for the last time relive what it was like to go to school and show off your work. The day of the presentation came and I went to school after work. I was happy to see my instructors and classmates. There were also some prospective students who had come to see our presentations. My presentation went well and I could not believe that I was now a graduate! It was a surreal feeling. I wished all my classmates luck for their future accomplishments. It was a great experience of being a student at Centennial College - Story Arts Center and being a graduate of Interactive Media Management.       

Welcome aboard Every1Games. Let me introduce you to the crew. Capt. Sarah, 1st Mate Cameron Hamilton Niagara region, 1st Mate Tina Toronto region, 2 Mate Mark, Bosun Damien, Chief Engineer Bram, 2 Engineer Ronnie, 3 Engineer Carl and Stewart/Cook myself.

On this 10 week voyage I had a chance to work with all crew members learning many skills and applying a few skills of my own. Here is a breakdown of my logs.

Week One Taking the initiative and starting a first impression analysis and a content audit analysis of their website. Hit The Ground Running (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/146137286494/hit-the-ground-running).  

Week Two Meeting with Sarah at Corus Entertainment going over my research and developing my networking skills at Interactive Ontario’s annual general meeting. Rooftop Social (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/146487831589/rooftop-social).

Week Three and Week Four Content Consultant: First impressions and Content audit. Social Media Consultant: Posting blogs, checking and editing social media accounts. Web Developer: Developing a database spreadsheet in Excel to input contact information for user experience testing. Teaching Assistant: Creating a lesson on the basics of Axure software and the importance of wireframes when building a prototype. Wearing Many Hats (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/147175759534/wearing-many-hats).

Week Five (Halfway Through) Posting blog posts about Every1Games on social media. One-day training on social behavior in a neurodiverse educational environment. Biography blog posts on the guest speakers for Autism Friendly Au-Some Conference. Pushing Through (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/147526328259/pushing-through).

Week Six Staff introduction to the students, meet and greet. Workshop with Sarah, JP and Nasir from Deloitte Consulting Firm, parents of the students, and Sasha one of my professors from Centennial College. Going over the discovery phase research for Every1Games website. Validation Of Learning (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/147881238984/validation-of-learning).

Week Seven Field trip to Gamma Space by Bento Miso a collaborative gaming studio. Used Canva software to create staff biographies. Researched information on government funding and grants. Research and Collaborative Spaces (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/148227153989/research-and-collaborative-spaces).

Week Eight Learn about script writing and new software (3DS Max, GarageBand, Unreal4, Adobe After Effects). Research on camps and class courses in the digital Industry. Giving support and positive feedback to students on their projects. Amazing Students (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/148573151214/amazing-students).

Week Nine Adding more information to comparative analysis. Helping staff gather student’s projects together to create a portfolio the students can take home. Saying goodbye to the students and wishing them well in their futures. Saying Goodbye (http://odelia76.tumblr.com/post/148906972669/saying-goodbye).

Week Ten (Last Week) Creating a 2 minute video about my field placement experience. And a 10 minute presentation about what I did. What I learned. What challenges I faced and how I solve these challenges. Where do I see myself going in the future.

This week the crew and I put down long hours to put together my presentation.  We have been through sunny days and stormy seas.  This has been a great voyage of personal and professional discoveries.  It is truly an honor to work and serve with this amazing crew aboard this internship Every1Games.

    It's hard to believe that nine weeks of my internship has passed. Moreover, my last semester is coming to its end. I'm nervous but excited at the same timeA lot of stuff has been done, and much remains to be done, both regarding my current project and for myself as a professional.

      For this moment, I finished Mission Statement for canadiangovernmentexecutive.ca, extended the First Impression report after conducting the additional height level testing of website and researched potential users of the site by myself. I still need feedback from Jon to be hundred percent sure that I'm on a right track, though. I can not say that this is a big problem at the moment because I still have time until the end of the summer to finish all my work.

      All the rest of the time I spent preparing for my presentation, practice my speech and writing  IMM reflection. After my first draft of presentation deck, I felt unsatisfied with the result. My mistake was preparing a slide at the beginning and writing a speech script based on it, not vice versa. So I decided to redo it and make more consistent with video and my speech. Fortunately, this was more structural changes, and it didn't take a lot of time. I also reduced the amount of textual information on the slides to prevent distraction of the audience from my talking.

     I decided to start the presentation with a few words about the company and where it's located. After that show a short video about their Daily routines including photos both from my office and home. Then I will speak directly about our first project, its objectives, our progress, problems and difficulties what we faced, and this experience influenced me. The only thing is left to do - is to edit the video, but I think I will not have problems with this task.

The ninth week of my internship was very plain and was spent finishing up the projects and making the final presentation video. I was also busy learning some front end coding and development for my next project where I will be coding a small game.  One thing that I have started to realize is that having a good relationship with the dev team helps a lot as a designer as they usually have very useful input on accessibility and colors and secondly, learning how to code not only helped me appreciate what the dev team does but also gave an insight into how to design. 

I will be talking a little about what we discussed this week in our weekly team meeting i.e. Content first approach in Design and Development. We discussed that the primary job of a website is to deliver good content and the design should be done based around it. As content development takes some time, we discussed on how we can have a proto-content that can be used to design as early as possible. This approach not only gives a start to the design team but also helps the content team to see where they have to change the content and/or make new content. There is no issue with using lorem ipsum; it is just that one can never gauge the text size or how the content will affect the design by it. In short, we do not need perfect content in our imperfect prototype, just something that resembles the real thing and not some gibberish that then will affect the whole design and flow. Not only the design gets affected but the dev team also has to change the whole structure of the code because of the new design changes. We discussed how I had made proto-content for a project called Sleep Diary so that I can start designing it as the content team could not start working on it immediately. The recommendations I made then helped the content team to narrow down the scope and come up with the content very fast. The content change did not affect my design or the dev team’s work. 

• What did you do this week?

Continued adding more links to the camp section on the comparative analysis.

Helped with getting the students ready for their group projects. Making sure they completed their (video assets, 3D assets, 2D posters, arcade game, and animation) part of the project and submitted it. Provided encouragement and positive advice.

Taking photos of their work and wishing these amazing adults well in their future and saying goodbye.

• What did you learn this week?

What did I learned over the past 8 weeks at Every1Games working with the students and staff.  

2D and 3D Assets, how to render a video, 1 Point and 2 Point Perspective Grids, Guestre Drawing, Script Writing and Story Writing Proposal, Level Design, Camera and Lighting. And learning about the software being used in the gaming industry. Garageband audio file creation, 3DS Max, Unreal 4.

• What are your thoughts about what you did and learned this week?

Working at Every1Games taught me a lot about Accommodations, Peer Support, Assistance, Behaviours, and Triggers.  The services being provided to the students from their successful adult peers provides hope for their future.

• Did you run into any problems? How did you resolve them?

There have been challenges, difficulties and misunderstanding among students and at times among staff. We learned a lot about our behavioural triggers and how to talk things out.  We remind each other that we work and learn in a safe non-judgmental environment where creativity thrives.