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