It'sThe Final Countdown

This week was really busy for our project and also the last. On Monday we met and worked hard to get a working product ready for the final meeting with our project partner.

Boxy little plan

We got things done pretty nicely and decided that the final report will be done outside of our meetings, with everyone having their designated part to write.

On Thursday morning we met again for NFO (New Factory Open) and built the box and brochures to show to the people there. Unfortunately there is not a clear picture of them available. We got some nice feedback from the people that visited our table, which was nice. All in all NFO was really nice with amazing speeches and friendly and open atmosphere.

Selling happiness in a box

On Friday we met with our project partners for the last time and presented everything we had worked so hard for these past three months. It felt good and I'm feeling optimistic about them licensing our plan. 

Final hours: Aku 98h, Helen 60h, Johanna 77.5h, Andres 61.5h and Tatiana 68.5h.

It was a pleasure to manage this project and I wish the best for everybody associated with us and our work!!!!

Keep Calm and Work Hard

Busy busy....the project is turning into a final race against time. Everyone is pushing to get the project finished in due time and I can assure you, there is a lot to do. But we are a team known to be extremely effective and we work very well under pressure.

On Monday we worked a long day to get the whole product to work as a holistic social marketing campaign that is ready to be presented at our Final Pitching event in Demola and also quite ready to be presented for our project partner in the Final Meeting.

The Final Pitching event was today and I must say that I am very proud of our team! I'm sure we had one of the best pitches of our patch so we are now exited to hear who are the 3 best pitches of Demola Spring 2015. We are at least a very strong candidate. And taking into consideration the journey of this project, I am even more proud of our team that we have been able to pull the project together and make it into something that can be pitched and sold.

Next week we have our work cut out for ourselves. We still need to develop the meters to measure the success of the product, come up with a questionnaire for the student, to translate everything we have done into Finnish, write the Final Report and sell the product and get it licensed. The majority of that should happen on next Monday pretty much and on Friday we have our Final Meeting with the project partner.

So..we know what to do, now we just have to do it!

Working on the campaign

This week we met two times to develop our campaign for teachers further. Last week the project partners informed us that the campaign is going to last 1-1.5 years for the first time, and then can be repeated or redesigned.  Moreover, they provided us with a publication that combines various statistics related to the lack of community at the universities in Finland. We decided that the exact figures that are based on the research should be used in our campaign to give a clearer picture of the current situation. We created four card sketches that will be used in the campaign. Each card starts with the question that will motivate teachers to interact with students more, promote the sense of scientific community, and, in general, be a better teacher. Besides, they contain conceptual images, statistics that will draw teachers’ attention and some solutions/suggestions related to the existing problems. We came up with the idea that the box, that includes an introduction letter and folded cards, will be delivered to each unit in the beginning of each period. In total there will be four boxes for four periods of the year.

Generating new ideas

Enjoying our results

Next week we are planning to improve the sketches and design the prototypes for the cards. The next step will be creating cards in the shape of triangle similar to those that are often placed in cafeterias of the campuses. These cards will represent our campaign to students. Also, next week there is the last pitching event where we’re going to show what we've done so far and the result we’re planning to achieve. It's great to see this project nearing the finish line!

Cumulative time consumption for this week: Aku 66.5h, Helen 58h, Tatiana 53.5h, Andres 55.5h and Johanna 50.5h.

Positivity is piercing

This week was really hectic for our project. We had a new angle and a direction, so we had to start almost from scratch, which is why decided to meet two times before the meeting with our project partner. This time we tried a new strategy and tried to do things more concretely, on paper. We made these huge poster-like things with ideas, plans and conceptual images in each one. Together they would make up the social marketing campaign with the goal of changing or influencing our teachers for the better. Down below you can see a glimpse of our creations.

 

Mr. two-face

Who am I?

Andres putting in the finest of work

Everybody hard at work, luckily there was coffee :)

Our project partner was really pleased with our work this time around! They said that we are finally really on the right track and suggested some improvement ideas and things we could or should focus on for the rest of the time we have to make this stuff pure gold. We are feeling pretty confident now about the project and I'm sure everyone will get something out of our end results.

Cumulative time consumption for this week: Aku 63h, Helen 56.5h, Tatiana 49h, Andres 54h and Johanna 48.5h.

Students & Professors

After the meeting with the Project partners, we are now focusing only on develop a campaign for the teachers and professors. Right now, all the effort is going to the creation of campaign where we can highly the role of the professors and teachers in the campus area, as we know, the professors are very important figures at the universities because they are the persons who give us the knowledge and help us to develop our skills in our professional life. At the same time we realize how important is for professors to know their students and let them realize who they are teaching for. On the other hand, is also important for students to know who is teaching them, is not only important someone with a lot of knowledge about different fields but also someone with passion and dedication of the teaching area using useful methodologies which help students to improve on their future.

In our meeting after the project partner session, we came out with different ideas about how to improve the relation between professors and students but the main point was to make the professors realize their role. First thing that came to our mind was the creation of a campaign which would help the professors to think about what kind of professors they are and how they think the students see them. At the same time we thought about a creation of a white wall where students could write short adjectives of how they see their professors. On the other hand we also thought about making a video showing interactions between professors and students, showing different perspective about how classes and interactions are. Finally other example of campaign is to build little cards promoting the importance of the relation and interaction between professors and students.

This week we will meet and we are going to decide which campaigns we are going to develop, the content of them and how we are going to do it.

The cumulative working hours this week were the following: Aku: 54, Helen; 46, Johanna: 42,5 Andrés: 50 Tatiana: 46

We finally found the path to follow!

This week was pretty stormy on the field of our project as we have been trying to figure out which path we should take and follow to finish the project successfully. It feels like we have been going round in circles as we have been stuck at brainstorming stage for a way too long. The project has faced many challenges during its relatively short life and as mentioned in the previous blog post we desire to implement changes that would really have an impact. Unfortunately our playing field is very restricted and for this reason we had to give up many ideas.

This week, however, we finally found the direction to go for. First we met on Wednesday to discuss further the ideas that had raised on the brainstorming session last week. Nevertheless the session felt like being helpful we agreed that the new ideas were not such that they would have strong impact considering the communality among students. We found ourselves questioning again whether those were the solutions we would like to develop further. After all we decided to give up with the idea of organizing games for students to play at campus and we focused our discussion on how to improve tutor trainings. We got some new perspectives to the problem and decided to present our ideas on partners' meeting on Friday.

On Friday we had again a fruitful discussion with the project partners who also showed some criticism towards our solutions. Our facilitator Aino showed up on a critical moment to challenge both us and the partners to think about what we really want to get out of this project. She also reminded us of the very limited period of time that is left before the project ends. It was good to have somebody to say it out loud to make everybody understand that we have to stop wandering around the problem and to choose one path to go.  

In the end of the partners' meeting we agreed that the new and the final approach to the problem will be the aim of building a sense of science community at campuses. We want to make students feel that they have an important role at the university and that everybody's contribution is needed to make significant science. Now we are just got to work hard to find solutions for how this sense of communality could be built up to able to finish the project in time.

We also met our responsible teacher Tero on Friday and I would say that I wish we met him before. He really got us to understand at what stage our project is now by asking questions about what we have done so far. By questioning our approach and the work we have done he made us understand that there is still a lot more to be done. Furthermore he gave us very good tips considering how we should spend the last month of the project period to get the most out of it.

The week was definitely not the easiest week so far but it was very significant considering the future of our project as it got us finally on the right track. There are still some challenges we need to cope with, for instance the problem of scheduling as our timetables seem to diverge strongly from each other and we should meet often from now on as we are running out of time. In any case it was nice to see that even though we are facing problems everybody seems to able to keep the spirit high. After the official part of the Friday meeting we had a nice lunch and free discussion together with the project group. We still trust each other and have belief in the project and that's why I believe that we will succeed in the end.

The cumulative working hours this week were the following: Aku: 51.5, Helen; 45, Johanna: 40, Andrés: 45.5, Tatiana: 43.5.

Pushing through..

We are beginning to reach the latter part of our project and in a about 5-6 weeks we should have a ready product to help the campuses become more close and communal. The team has worked hard to find solutions and we have come up with many kinds of ideas, some of them good and some of them not so good.

This week we met twice, first on Tuesday and again on Friday. On Tuesday we tried to deal with the project-partner meeting that we had on Friday. We found out that we most probably have to let go of one of our solutions on which we have worked for some time. The solution in itself is good but just hard to implement quickly and would require quite big arrangements to make it happen. Some of our social marketing ideas proved to be too costly for our project-partner so we are going to have to look for cheaper solutions. We weren't still ready to let go of some of our social marketing ideas but we are trying to find cheaper or free ways to make them happen.
On Tuesday we also tried to come up with some new ideas that we could start pondering upon. We came up with some ideas that we then could brainstorm better on Friday.

On Friday we asked our facilitator to help us again with brainstorming and she did brilliant job again. We thought of our new ideas and tried to refine them a bit further by asking questions after questions like: what, why, who, when, how etc. In the end we answered the questions and now we have some new perspectives which to elaborate on.

Some my own thoughts on the project is that I find it a bit frustrating that we don't have the necessary resources to execute good solutions. Right now I feel that we are dealing with quite superficial ideas and solutions and I'm afraid in the end they don't end up making a difference. We should be able to think bigger and deeper. Some of the biggest questions in my opinion would be: How can we make people to change their behavior into the direction that we want? How can we reach permanent change of behavior? Should we be able to change the structures that prevent communality from happening? If communality is created with good leadership, who are the people that we need to reach? Then the following question is: where can we find resources to implement bigger solutions?

I hope we will be able to push through so that the students will benefit from all our work in the end because they are the reason we are working hard for. But besides that I think this project has been very good experience of project-work and the nature of project-working. Especially when the solutions you're trying to reach is something more abstract in nature and not for example an app or a game or any solid product. Despite of the challenges and frustrations (which are natural parts of project-work) the team is still well motivated and keeping positive and we believe in the importance of what we are doing. We are sure that we will do well in the end!

Pretty productive week!

This week we met three times, on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. On Tuesday we discussed for long about our solutions which the project partners wanted us to develop further. It took some time to make everyone of us to understand the approaches the same way and to agree about the contents of different solutions in detail. However, we managed it well enough and furthermore we got some new ideas for the possible details of the solutions.

The Facebook page which we published last week didn't turn out to be very successful as we haven't got any comments so far. Probably people are afraid of sharing their opinions and stories in public. Therefore we decided to make questionnaire to find out how the students feel like about different issues related to the campuses. The aim of the questionnaire was to get some new ideas and especially to understand what are the reasons for why people get excluded from the campus community. We hope that we will get many answer to our questions as the questionnaire will be send through university email lists next week.

On Thursday there was Demola Pitching Event which took a place at New Factory. Aku and Andrés were the brave ones to pitch about our project. It went very well and hopefully it gave a clearer idea of our project to our peers at Demola. It also helped us to realize which issues we should focus on while we pitch about our project in the future.

On Friday we had a meeting with the project partners. We presented them what we had come up with this week and discussed the ideas. The discussion was fruitful and very beneficial for us as now we know better in which solution we should focus on. Hence next week we will work on marketing campagn and think about how we could get the tutors more involved in the future.

The cumulative time consumption for each of us after this week is following. Andrés: 37,5, Aku: 41,5, Helen: 36, Johanna; 32, Tatiana: 34,5. Let's see what we will come up with next week!

Easter emitting encounter

We had a short, but rather fruitous meeting yesterday (wednesday), which was the april fool's day. The special day meant nothing however, because we certainly weren't fooling around! Firstly we masterfully implemented the idea we got in the last meeting (if my memory serves me right) and opened up a Facebook-page for asking questions from our dear fellows students and gathering information that way. You can see this work of art below.

The Q&A Facebook page

It's been a whole completely full day, but not a single soul has answered even one of our opening question, which means more promotion is bound to ensue... I won't go into detail about it that much, so let's just hope we'll get at least something out of our dear followers by the time next week's blog hits the stores (keeping fingers crossed)!

Beside doing the page thingy we also started developing some of the ideas that received green light from our project partner last week. We made no significant progress, but eveything something! Next week we'll have more time to focus on the ideas and I'm sure we'll come up with something golden, because if we don't the Demola pitching event next thursday is going to be semi-sucky for us, but I doubt it will come to that, because we are the dream team and when we say woo-woo the train goes like umm... choo-chooo!!!!!!!! (We forgot to take a group photo this week, but hopefully my excitement comes through in the form of this text!)

Our excel sheet says that our cumulated time consumption thus far has been 30.5 hours for Aku, 25.5 hours for Helen, 28.5 hours for Johanna, 27 hours for Andrés and 27 hours for Tatiana. That is like over 100 man hours, pretty nice huh?

Brainstorming session and initial ideas

This week we met on Wednesday to have a brainstorming session, combine all the ideas and concentrate on the best ideas that we were going to present to the project partner on Friday. Our facilitator Aino helped us a lot by introducing a brilliant way to generate the ideas quickly. She prepared five questions related to our project for five members of our team and cards that inspire creative thinking and brainstorms. Every card has a name and a textual definition of the category, for example, “Challenge: Testing abilities in a demanding task”. In addition, all cards have images illustrating the main idea for the category they represent. Each of us randomly picked one card from the deck and tried to come up with some ideas on the basis of the card. After one minute of thinking and writing ideas to the piece of paper, each of us picked another card to get more inspiration and look at the question from another perspective. We repeated this process several times and then exchanged the questions to elaborate further on the ideas of our teammates and develop our own. After several rounds we had the papers full of different thoughts and solutions. Also, this approach helped us come up with ideas that, at first, seemed a bit crazy. After analyzing and developing them further, they turned into the excellent ones. At the end of the session we evaluated our ideas and picked the best ones that we were going to present to the project partners.

Brainstorming

Inspirational cards

On Friday we had a meeting with the project partners where we demonstrated our initial ideas. The meeting was very productive as we got the feedback to our solutions and discussed which of them are realistic. We came up with three ideas that should be developed further, and also agreed on conducting some interviews and questionnaires to involve students, staff and stakeholders to our project. Last week we came up with the idea of creating an open Facebook-page where people can influence our project. This week after the meeting with the project partners we formulated the initial questions for students and staff related to their opinions and thoughts on how we can improve the sense of community at our campuses. It will help our project to go in the right direction and get as many ideas as possible.

The power of community

Last week Tuesday was the day chosen for all of us to meet, but due to unforeseen circumstances we have to change the day. The team will meet next time on Wednesday and try to fix the schedule for the future meetings again. At the meeting we are going to develop the chosen ideas further according to the responses received. The next meeting with the project partner will be in two weeks as it has been planned.

This week’s working hours: Aku 4,5, Johanna 4,5, Helen 2, Tatiana 4,5, Andres 4,5.

JAM 2!

After the “Ok” from our Project partner's part, we wanted to meet this week to finally make a plan and to brainstorm for the project but it was impossible to fix a date because of our different schedules. So, we decided to meet up on Jam's day and make a team schedule then. 

On the second Jam’s day (Saturday) we all gathered in the new Demola factory. After breakfast, we started doing different activities. One of the activities was "speed date pitching".  On this occasion the pitching more than receiving detailed feedback from the other colleagues. This helped us in the way that we could build a better communicative capacity when it comes to presenting our project. It was interesting to observe how after pitching people were feeling more and more comfortable talking about their own project. This speed pitching was very interesting because it helped us to learn about how to introduce our project in a short period of time. 

"Speed Date Pitching"

One important thing that we learned during this jam session was the importance of using meters. Meters are tools for feedback by users that use our products. Because in our case the project is something more theoretical-social, it would reflect in the use of methods such as interviews or questionnaires to find out the opinions of the employees and students of the university campus, where they will tell their story and experiences and how they think how a community campus spirit would be created without leaving anyone behind. After several more activities, the lunch time arrived. Don't know what it is but the food of Demola is just perfect, and generous :D

Snack time

During the afternoon we had another activity which was super useful for getting feedback from others. One interesting things that we found out in these feedbacks was that many of the them suggested that maybe we should create some app or website which would help us to promote the sense of community in the student life. In this feedback-task each of us were in different groups so we could see other projects and other approaches.

At the end of the day we fixed our schedules for our future meetings. Tuesday have been the day chosen for all of us to meet and do our project even though we are going to do individual work as well. As exception, this week we are going to meet on Wednesday and we are going to bring our brainstorming to the meeting and put all of them together. This brainstorm would be based of possible ways to increase the social cohesion on the campus area and try to find some mechanism which could help us to do this. At the end of this session we will present our ideas to our project partner on Friday. We also came up with an idea how to collect information and ideas from students. We will create a Facebook website where we can invite our friends and friends of our friends and make some questions through which they can give us information on how they e.g experience community and what are the barriers keeping them from experiencing the sense of community etc. This idea is still on progress but we think it could be a good way to pick up information.

This weeks working hours: Aku 8, Johanna 8, Helen 8, Tatiana 8, Andres 8.

Houston, we don't have a problem and we are all good to go!

We finally got the confirmation that the project will happen and the finances have been sorted out. Though we had a strong belief on this, it was nice to know for sure that the project will actualize. Now we can all start really working and planning for the execution.

This week on Wednesday we met with those of us who were available to plan our initial meeting with the project partner. We went through the basics of what we know of the project and based on that formed some questions we wanted to ask our project partner. We also discussed the material about social marketing that we got from FSHS. Our main goal for the project partner meeting was to get a clearer picture of the project and what is expected from us, mainly if it's more research on the matter or practical solutions that is wanted.

On Thursday we had the initial project partner meeting and it was very nice to finally meet with the people who we are working for and with. In the meeting we went through the Demola practices and how the project goes onward. Then we heard what are FSHS's thoughts on the project and lastly we had a good conversation on the topic where we all got to share a little of our own opinions and thoughts on the matter.

The main line on FSHS's part was that we would think outside the box and be innovative with what ever ideas we come up with. The focus should be on finding out what are the structures that prevent people from experiencing communality and on the other hand what are the structures that promote communality. We want to find out what things lead to people meeting each others or not meeting each others. Also a point was made that it's not only the social aspect that can create the sense of communality but it can form also by a person realizing something in himself/herself. Maybe we can brand our campus community in some way and create a mindset where people can straight away feel they are a part of something?

We also watched a little video of  how social marketing could work and with that in mind we were instructed to go for even the craziest of ideas and be bold in our thinking!

We planned to meet our project partner every 2 weeks and we also set the dates already until the end of May. Our plan with the team is to also meet weekly as we think face to face meetings are necessary in order to make a succesful project and of course we all do independent work as well. The team will meet next time on Tuesday to brief in the other team members who couldn't participate this week and to get the project fully going.
This weeks working hours: Aku 3,5, Johanna 6,5, Helen 3,5, Tatiana -, Andres -.

Supportive Campus Leaves No One Behind

The Finnish Student Health Service (FSHS) has a commitment to promote the health and wellbeing of students and help them maintain their ability to cope with the demands of studying at the university. The majority of first-year students adjust to their new environment with relative ease, but research results have demonstrated that one third of students do not feel that they are a part of any peer group. A lack of social relationships may not only cause emotional distress but also hinder academic progress in the long run. Supportive Campus Community -project was started in February 2015 with a goal of promoting community spirit among students.

The project kicked off at the New Factory premises on February 10th where we were informed about the process of carrying out this project and also met with the team for the first time. The team consists of 5 students and is international with Finnish, Russian and Spanish nationalities represented. Our working language is English, which brings on the challenge of communicating and getting our points and knowledge across. But I have to say that so far there has been no problems in understanding each others and everyone's in with an awesome attitude and really wanting to make a difference and obtaining some concrete results from the project.

The Dream Team

Next we met with the team the following week just to hang out and getting to know each others, talk about the project and to do some brainstorming. We wanted to be ready for our first meeting with our project partner, which unfortunately then had to be cancelled due to financial challenges and postponed to the near future. Despite of the unexpected changes, we kept our spirit high and went on with the planning. We all believe this project is important enough to get the funding and it will happen, so we are moving forward with full speed.

Brainstorming

The next step was to participate in Demola Jam on 21st of February. The purpose of the Jam was to give the project a push forward with some planning, pitching, demonstrations and feedback. Despite the fact that we hadn't met with our project partner, we wanted to get most out of the long day and designed a prototype of the Supportive Campus.

Building in progress

Supportive Campus - prototype

We had so much fun designing, building and spending time in a very international and warm atmosphere. The idea was to create the prototype and pitch the project in small teams. We got really good feedback from the demonstrations, mostly in a form of very good questions. Questions like: What kind of community we want to build? Define communality. What is the difference to what is already there? How can one find a peer?

The questions led us eventually to a conclusion that at the moment maybe we shouldn't concentrate so much on the end result than to research communality and how to build it, find out what are the problems we are facing at our campuses, what are the reasons some students are not integrating, how to bring so many different kinds of people together etc. So we decided our next step is to get as much information on the subject as possible and trust that eventually it will lead us to the best solutions and practices and activities to build a Supportive Campus that leaves No One behind.

This weeks working hours: Aku 12,5, Johanna 12, Helen 12, Tatiana 12, Andres 12.