Reflections

Jun Cheng

Overall

We decided to continue this project from last year because our project attracted a large pool of students with our social platform and website and many of them hoped for us to continue and release our interesting and engaging findings with them so they can know our school better. Hence, we continued this project project hoping to benefit more people.

This year-long project is very enriching, fruitful and enjoyable, as I have learnt and know more about the school’s past, present and future, which many students tend to overlook and knows little about, while doing the project at the same time to allow other students to know about the background of the school as well. This project definitely gave many students the bird’s eye view of of the past to the future. We created various resources such as the interactive map, the current activities, card games, applications to benefit a wider pool of students and their parents and we hope that it will be useful for them. It was a good experience for me.

Throughout this fruitful journey, learnt how to collect and display our findings onto our websites appropriately. I could also get used to cooperating with group members as a team and be more open to others’ suggestions & learn to understand each other at times of conflict. I have also become more disciplined to do research more efficiently & manage my time well from the hectic student lifestyle. Most importantly, we could forge stronger bonds of friendships between each other. However, this project was not easy & we went through many ups and downs, facing many problems in the process too.

Problem Faced

As it is a project from the past year, it is a requirement that we need to have 70% of new work and products for our project. This would essentially mean that we have to scale last year’s project down to only 30%. Last year’s project was a big one where we had a website, interactive map and also the card game. To scale it down would mean that we need to be very innovative and creative, to create more products and design.this year. It was tough to think about products and designs that would satisfy the community and would be a need for the audiences. Many consideration had to be taken and many ideas have to be taken down due to their not-so-feasible features for the audiences. Lastly, we came up with few ideas.

Firstly, the application. This is not an easy task because it requires much work. Moreover, if the application is the exact replica of the website, then there is absolutely no point in creating the app, the audience can just go to our website, hence, we need to make our app different from the website and include other features. As well, we need to make it informative, attractive and user-friendly so that the audience can enjoy scrolling through our information and download our app to achieve our objectives. In order to create the app, there must be a platform for us to create the app. This took us quite some time because many servers require money to create the app, while some are free but could only provide us with the basic looks, which makes the app look very less attractive and simple. It took us a while to find “Como” to create our app. Next, it requires skills to complete the app and make it user-friendly. The only person in our group who could design the app well is Ming Hui, so we have to rely heavily on him to create the app while we are the associates to aid him when he requires help.

Secondly, it is the website. The website was already built up last year, but in order to achieve 70%, we have to add more content to the website. Hence this year, we remade the website to make it look more glamourous. We had included the CCA and Sabbatical section. This section allows the students to get hold of some strategy to make their life in Hwa Chong a more meaningful and enjoyable one. This adds on to our “present” part of our “past, present, future” theme. We also added the HCI Archive section. This is actually suggested by our mentor, we had added it in because we believe the student’s review of the school will let freshmen and their parents to have a better view of what is going to happen in years to come and what to expect. We have also added more information to engage the wide pool of audience.

Thirdly, the social media. To garner more support for our project, it is essential to have a social media platform for us to communicate with our audience. Through communication, we can know how the audiences feel about our project through conducting survey and pilot tests, we can then improve our product according to their needs and opinions. We can also know what the audiences want to see in our project, in this way, we have create a fresh product to satisfy their needs. Through social media, we can also promote our products so it can reach a wider pool of audience. We can also share our collection of information to them through the social media. Hence, we had created Instagram and a Facebook Page. However, we have to maintain the these platforms and keep it active frequently, this is to answer the queries and keep a steady pool of audiences.

Fourthly, the amazing race. This product requires effort as we need to put ourselves in the freshmen shoes to feel how the amazing race will work so that we can make it more engaging and interesting for them so they can get to know the school compound better and learn about the school’s history. Furthermore, just 4 students is not enough to manage the amazing race’s progress and keep an eye of the student’s safety, hence, we need to convince the councillors that our project is worth the councillor’s support and hence, they will aid us in the progress of the game to ensure that students are fully engaged,

Our project also faces the problem of a slow progress. During project meetings, we were all easily distracted by surrounding stuffs. We have the tendency of taking long time for lunch, starting to play online games in the middle of the meeting, hence slowing down our progress. In order to block away the sources of our distractions, we tried various measures like banning use of YouTube or music playing during work time. These measures work for a while, but soon after we forgot all these rules & start wasting time again, be it from taking long lunch breaks to playing card & board games, especially during the June holidays. Hence, we need to have more frequent meetings to cope up with our project progress. But nevertheless, we had always met up with the deadline.

The last problem that we face is that we need to make our product stand out from the rest of the projects.

Many of our products are similar and it is our work to make it better and different from what other teams have done so it would be an interesting and original idea.

In conclusion, I really learnt a lot from this year’s project and I think that it would help me greatly in the future as I learnt important skills such as time-management, teamwork and independence.

Mdm Chan: Our mentor who has guided us & gave us many ideas
Mrs Ke: Our mentor who organized meetings on a frequent basis and corrected fallacious errors in our product and presentations and alsogave us many helpful ideas that would benefit the community
The librarians (High School Section): For giving us permission to enter the room where the Old Yearbooks are kept so we could progress and observe the changes throughout the years
Our judges who have given us feedback from the various judging rounds, helping us improve our project with the useful feedback to create a better product to attract wider pool of audiences
Our followers/audience who have given us useful feedback, aided us in our pilot tests, cooperative and provided us with support all-year-round
My team members: Ming Hui, James and Hauxiang who have helped throughout this journey and collaborated with me to make this a memorable experience

Hau Xiang

It has been a fruitful and enriching year for me this year doing our IS project, as I had managed to learn many things throughout the process of the course and duration, such as learning more about the find out more about HCI while doing the project simultaneously, giving me a better understanding of the school. Creating all the various types of products like the new website and mobile app etc were a new experience for me, and it was fun to learn, since it was my first time doing Resource Development for these three years.

Problems Faced

One of the main problems we faced was that our main products all required a certain level of IT knowledge for the mobile app especially, and only Minghui has the experience, thus we had to rely heavily on him for doing the designs, layout & also the complicated programming of the app , causing him to have a high workload. Hence, we always do as much content for our products from our findings, collating it all in a shared document, so that he can easily copy and paste the content onto our products. Of course, we still edited a reasonable portion of the website & gave him some suggestions into the design along the way. All members hence contributed equally.

We were easily distracted while doing our project and procrastinated a lot, for we always had the tendency to do work before lunch but once we return we start playing games instead of continuing work. This was really one point that slowed our progress. In order to block away the sources of our distractions, we tried various measures like banning use of YouTube or music playing during work time. These measures work for a while, but soon after we forgot all these rules & start wasting time again, be it from taking long lunch breaks to playing card & board games, especially during the June holidays where we were ahead of other groups, spending much time relaxing and playing, only doing minimal work.

As for our project itself, we faced one main problem that we struggled to tackle initially-to make our project stand out from the rest. Many other groups from previous years have already covered HCI History, CCA information and sabbatical informations, so we had the challenge to make our project different & stand out from others. Before the Prelims, we were only planning a Website & a Flash Applet of the school, but that was definitely not enough. Even the judges commented the same thing-to expand our scope, which we did. We brainstormed many ideas like a mobile app, QR codes, an Amazing Race Proposal and more. Also, our Facebook Page would spread more of our information to students online. Hence, all these elements of our project help our audience in the learning of our school history in many different aspects, & it has been quite successful, gaining positive feedback.

My thoughts after this arduous journey

And there we have, the end to our project, HCIStory 2. All the times we had, all the work we done, all the laughter we had. I couldn't have had a better experience than this, I would like to thank everyone for leaving this memory and mark in my history, making a milestone in my life. To this, I had the mindset that we are always one, and that this was one of the keys to our success, bonding, teamwork, understanding one another, ensuring that each and everyone of us did our best. Overall, I feel there are still many ways that we could have improved on-mainly how we need to learn to manage our time wisely & also be more decisive when making decision & enforcing our ideas, just like sometimes where we cannot make up our decisions and would drag on, wasting time. We learnt to make full use of our time & do our project fast & efficiently, giving us extra time to improve on the extra functions, content, design etc. All in all, I have really learnt a lot from the project, be it practical skills in IT or values & character which can be applied to many other situations in life in the future. Lastly to make full use of time and not waste time away. As such, this has been a very meaningful & enjoyable experience for it has allowed me to learn many values that will lead to success in life in the bright future.

I would like to thank the following people for giving me such a memorable time:

Mdm Chan: Our mentor who has guided us & provided us with useful advice for our project

Mrs Ke: Our mentor for the second half of the year, who was very hardworking and provided many useful tips and pint points

The librarians(High School Section:For giving us permission to enter the room where the Old Yearbooks are kept

Our judges who have given us feedback from the various judging rounds, helping us improve our project with the useful feedback

Our followers/audience who have given us useful feedback & provided us with support all-year-round

My team members: Gan Ming Hui, James Teo Lee Chen & Ng Jun Cheng who have helped & supported me throughout this journey & worked well with me, though I may not have been a very good team member.

James

I still can’t believe that this year’s project competition has ended as it happened in almost a blink of an eye. Personally, I really enjoyed this year project as I could continue doing the project I started last year. Also, as I was able to work with friends that I enjoyed great success with last year, I feel that the project was much more efficient and fun. Now, let me talk the process and happenings in this year’s project.

Firstly, I will talk about first challenge we faced. During the start of the year, the four of us had no idea on what we are going to do for this year’s project competition. Although we had a lot of idea, we could not decide on which topic or category we are going to do until around February. Just then, we suddenly thought that since we enjoyed last year project so much and we could do so much more for the project , why not we continue with the project this year. And this is how we came up with HCIstory2 and overcame our first small challenge.

Another challenge faced was on how to continue our project to make it successful. In order to continue our project, we had to have 70% new products and this was a very difficult task for us as we had already done so much work last year. In order to make sure that we have enough products to present this year, we asked our audience last year on what they would like us to improve on and many of us said they would like an app version of our project and wanted to know the present of our school too. And hence, together with some planning, we overcame our challenge and embarked on our project.

The last challenge was that we could not concentrate during project meetings as we would often play around and get easily distracted. After passing prelims easily as we were way ahead of other groups, we got a little complacent and instead of discussing about our project, we played around and did little work. Every project meeting became unproductive and after the June holidays, we were way behind the others. Fortunately, we all decided that it was time to do serious work and with 2 project meetings, we managed to assign each of us work to do and discuss seriously to complete our project in time. We worked very hard coming into Term 3 and completed tasks that we should have done in Term 2.

Fortunately, we passed the semi-finals and we did not make the same mistake again in the next few project meetings.

I have learnt a lot from this year IS project, such as how to create card games, designing, learning more about Hwa Chong’s past and present and many more. Another thing I enjoyed was our Facebook page as it was a platform where I could interact with other students to share with them fun facts and rumours of our school. Many students were interested and were satisfied with the information we provided. Lastly, I was able to find out much more about our school’s present- cca, sabbatical and as well interact with the alumni in our school and learn many valuable knowledge from them,

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this year’s project and I think that it would help me greatly when I grow up as I learned lots of important skills such as efficiency, time-management, team-work and independence.

Special thanks to:

Mdm Chan: Our mentor who has guided us & provided us with useful advice for our project
Mrs Ke: Our mentor for the second half of the year, which was very hardworking and provided many useful tips and pint pointing
The librarians (High School Section): For giving us permission to enter the room where the Old Yearbooks are kept
Our judges who have given us feedback from the various judging rounds, helping us improve our project with the useful feedback to create a better product
Our followers/audience who have given us useful feedback & provided us with support all-year-round
My team members: Gan Ming Hui, James Teo Lee Chen & Ng Jun Cheng who have helped & supported me throughout this journey & worked well with me, though I may not have been a very good team member

Ming Hui

It has been a memorable and enriching journey. No doubt, I have gained a lot through this project. I was able to learn about the school’s past such as old buildings through our own products in the process of completing this project. we had such a fun learning experience last year and it was part of the reason to continue the project this year. Many of our audience have gave us positive feedback and we feel the motivation to provide our users with more information about the school.

As this project is a continuation of that from the previous year, we had to provide 70% more new products. Given that we have already done a lot of work the previous year, it was hard for us to think of anymore new ideas. We would need to be very creative and innovative in order to attract the public and reach out to our audience. Eventually, all of the members provided with their individual ideas and our products extended from “past” to “present” and “future”.

We had also faced problems making our website more informative as there was a lack of ideas. Many past groups have already done projects on HCI History and CCA information, thus we face the challenge of making our project different from the others. We brainstormed many ideas such as a mobile app, a platform for interactions of alumni, as well as an Amazing Race Proposal to engage Sec Ones during Sec One Orientation. Our Facebook Page allow us to publicise our project and reach out to audience. Eventually, we were able to create new sections which include “All About Series” (CCA and Sabbatical), The HCI Amazing Race, The HCI Archive and The HCI Future School.

Another challenge we face was the lack of IT skills. As our products focus heavily on online content, such as the website and the mobile application, we were required to make it user-friendly as well as aesthetically attractive. At the start, we had a hard time finding a suitable server to create our app as most of them requires money, while some others only had a basic features. Eventually, we were able to find “Como” to create our app.

The large number of products led to another problem: work distribution. Since I am a member of the Infocomm Club, and our project requires a lot of IT skills, the workload all landed on me. Adding on to it was the stress I gave myself in making our project unique and original. The judges suggested us to add in more originality and make our project different from the others. Occasionally, I would feel as though I am the only one doing all the work, causing my temper to be really bad at times. I would scream at the rest, blaming them for not doing any work, which sometimes really ruins the atmosphere of our project meeting, ultimately leading to non-productive work. Better planning and work distribution made our progress much smoother. I realised that I need to allow others to do their part, not just throwing all the work onto myself.

Another problem we faced was distraction. We all had busy schedules, and thus could only meet up at most once per week. But that precious time was wasted as we were mainly playing around and not really doing work. We were already behind schedule and everyone was not really doing any work. Since our main source of distraction was social media such as YouTube and Facebook, we banned those applications and it worked well for a while, everyone was doing the work given promptly. But soon as we become more and more restless and bored of doing work, the rules were thrown aside and we started fooling around. Adding to the problems, we even went out to play sports and huge amount of time was then wasted. A possible measure could be that we work under adults’ supervision. Since we are all working at each other’s homes, it would be efficient if we had our parents watching over us. This problem actually made me think about my school life. If I were to be that districted for school work as well, what would be the consequences? This is the year where I have to decide what route I will be taking in the future and there is not time to waste on those meaningless distractions. I decided that I will be more discipline in both project work and school work.

Throughout this journey, I have grown up with our members. We went through ups and downs while overcoming problems. I felt that the project gave us the opportunity to create strong bonds with each other and I find that really meaningful. To be able to present our completed work, discipline and teamwork is very important. I was able to use the communication skills learnt from this journey in my daily life and it definitely helped me whenever there is group work for school work. I was also able to manage my time well in order to juggle the hectic school work and project work. No doubt, there would always be problems and as well as friction between group members. But fortunately, we were able to overcome those problems and emerge as better individuals.

Special thanks to:

Mdm Chan: Our mentor who has guided us and provided us with useful advice for our project
Mrs Ke: Our mentor for the second half of the year. Thank you for providing us with many useful suggestions
Our judges who have given us feedback from the various judging rounds, helping us improve our project with the useful feedback
Our audience who have given us useful feedback & provided us with support all-year-round

My team members who have helped & supported me throughout this journey although I may not be a good leader :)