By the end of this term, participants will...
- Develop familiarity with product design and development.
- Begin to master working on teams by working together in pairs.
- Build an impressive project to add to their portfolio and present at the Winter Open House.
- Develop greater resourcefulness in generating code, problem solving, and squashing bugs.
- Week 1 - Pick teams & Ideate
- Week 2 - Project Planning Docs - User Narratives, Wireframes, ERD.
- Week 3 - Sprint 1
- Week 4 - Sprint 2
- Week 5 - Sprint 3
- Week 6 - Presentations
All projects must have the following:
- Two partners working together.
- An advisor.
- A public github repo with a README.md file
- A backlog (in todo.txt file) and planned sprints.
- Follow a versioned release process (v1, v2, v3, v4).
- Be mobile responsive or be a mobile app.
- Must be live on the web and in the app store (if app)
- At least weekly meetings (on the calendar with a time and location).
- Projects must be written in Make School technologies: Python, JavaScript, Swift, Express.js, Flask, React.js, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc.
- A presentation (5min pitch, demo, and Q&A)
Turn in the following links in the Core 2 Project Tracker
- Staging URL Link
- Github URL Link
- Beauty and Usability (UI/UX)
- Code Craftsmanship
- Teamwork
- Project Planning
- Creativity
- Technical Sophistication
User narratives are stories where you get inside the heads of your users. They are NOT A LIST OF FEATURES.
Here's an example for a user narrative for a "Yelp for Landlords"
[info] Hi, I'm Randy the Renter and I'm looking for housing in San Francisco. I found 5 or 6 places on craiglist to live, but I want to see if the landlord is good because I've had trouble in the past with bad landlords. I go to "yelpforlandlords.com" and search by the address of the unit. The landlord comes up. It looks like they are a good landlord, 5 stars and based on the underlying property value, she doesn't gauge the renters. Awesome!
By fully getting inside the head of a user you can build an app that people actually want to use. This techinque can be used for hardware, software, even when you are building esoteric software development libraries, you always have a user that you want to make happy.
Another example:
[info] Hi, I'm Larry the Landlord and I'm a great landlord and want to read my reviews on yelpforlandlords.com. I visit the page and I look up my name. I find that I have many good reviews and I leave responses like "Thanks! You were a great tenant". On one negative review I try to give context to the problem they had.
- Write 3 user narratives for one of your favorite apps.
Wireframes are fast, rough sketches for your major views of your project.
- Read this article "How to Create Your First Wireframe" (8 min)
- Pick an app and draw a wireframe of the app
- pick an website and draw a wireframe of one page. (Don't forget to draw a second wireframe for how the screen looks on mobile)
- Read "Everything you need to Know about ERD".
- Now make 3 ERD's - one for each of your favorite apps or websites. (Just guess what their entities are named!)