My Overall Experience

It is an amazing journey for me to work as a leader & developer in a team of 3 to design and develop our own product.

When we first decided to do something to help kids cope with stress and thought of using plants as a gateway to solving the problem, all of us cannot imagine what is Human-Plant Interaction, cause it is not something we can see and feel in our daily life. 

Starting by reading other people’s research, and doing field research in different plant companies. We then met with professionals from the industry. Dr Pan from Malaysia mastered growing plants and Professor Bernaldo from Spain who is working on studying the relationship between plants and humans for many years.

We not only learn from the experts, we also approached many kids, who are our target audience, to understand what they say, what they think and what they want.

Then when we went through the development process, there are also a lot of difficulties we faced. But I am proud that we conquer all the challenges and finally deliver the final product.

 

My Learning Points

Team leader

As a team leader in the team, I need to arrange team meetings, assign tasks, review & make suggestions on teammates’ work and set milestones.

I need to say our team is facing many challenges while I am managing the team, but both of our teammates are very helpful. I was having a 4-days internship in May, but after a few weeks, I realized that I may not have enough time to work on the project, especially since I need to lead the team. Therefore, I resigned from the company and fully focused on the project.

One of my teammates – Carmen, was in Thailand during June, therefore, I assigned her more research and learning tasks, to make sure that she can do all the work online and can easily start 3D modelling once she is back in Singapore. 

However, there are still other challenges, I was sick for 4 weeks during the special term. The fever was so high but I did not want to delay the work plan. Therefore, I assigned more work to my teammates in advance, and they did them well.

Another challenge I was facing is about time management. Since Jichen (Joyce) was having an internship while Carmen was in Thailand, I discussed this with my teammates and they delivered the intention of hoping to delay the project deadline if possible. Then I discussed our situation with professors, and professors mentioned that it is possible to delay either half a semester or one semester. Therefore, our team actually make a plan for a longer timeline. However, due to the school arrangement, it seemed that it was impossible to have a semester delay for the project. The time was very limited at the moment, so I changed the strategy and encouraged my teammates to focus on the upcoming deadline and tried our best to deliver what we can do. With the help of the team, the result is decent.

Developer

As a developer in the team, I need to learn everything from the beginning. 

I spent a long time trying to figure out which Arduino board is suitable for us to use, as well as the sensors. With the help of my teammates and Mr Tony, we finally decided on using the OPLA IoT kit, which is very powerful and suitable for us to use.

I also spent a long time detecting the hardware error. I worked with Mr Tony for the whole 3 days, using different methods, finally, I was sure that the problem is about the display connection.

Designing the design system was also a very challenging thing since it is very rare to see a rounded display screen, which means I need to develop the design system from a draft. And when there are more features on the device, I attempted many times on simplifying the codes to make sure that the code is powerful as well as easy to edit and add new features.

It was also difficult to draw anything on the screen. Since we are focusing on kids, it is very important to visualize the data, therefore, icons and emotions are what we looking for. It is different from drawing with HTML, by drawing on the OPLA screen, I can only draw very basic shapes, and I need to define the position of the shapes by pixel. Normally, drawing a smiling face may spend 10 seconds on paper, however, if I want to draw a good smile face, I need to spend hours and even days on it. Which is challenging but has a lot of fun.

 

Learning in Action!

If there is another chance for me to do the project. 

As a team lead, I will have more frequent chats with my teammates and professors, so that I can understand more about the project from both my team and professors’ sides.

Meanwhile, I should be more empathetic toward my teammates, since everyone has their own life and our opinion on a good product may be different.

I also need to encourage my teammates more. Cause I notice that once I encourage them, they can do things much faster.

As a developer, I will spend more time studying other people’s work, so that I will not make the same mistakes.

I will also focus more on the readability of the code, as while as how to better simplify the code, so that the software can run faster, and other people can easily understand the logic of the code.