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?