Explain how you have grown as a team, and detail some of the strategies you have used to establish goals and plan tasks so far this semester.
Throughout the semester, we have greatly improved our communication and collaboration as a team. At the beginning of the semester, we had difficulty agreeing on a project idea and communicating our thoughts. We were making slow progress and had difficulty moving forward on some aspects of our project early on. Over the course of the semester, we have greatly improved in our ability communicate our ideas and work together. Some strategies we employ as a team to ensure strong communication and collaboration between team members include frequent checkins, updates every day about progress and encouraging team member progress, and collaborating on problems across sub-systems. For example, everybody is involved in discussions about the optimal way to design the front end and discussions about design choices on the electromechanical embosser. We have weekly meetings every Friday to discuss weekly progress and goals for the next week. These meetings allow team members to understand what other team members have been working and help us understand what needs to be done for the next week. We also establish goals and plan tasks by considering what has been accomplished in a week and gauging what gaps still need to be filled, which in part is also guided by our Gantt chart. At this point in the semester, our goals are also guided by testing we have coming up. For example, we had a goal to have the front-end completed by this Tuesday for a demo. We have another goal of having the entire electromechanical embosser pipeline complete for an upcoming demo after Thanksgiving.
Some weekly progress updates from our team: Joshna and Zeynep went to the LAMP Library on Tuesday to perform some user testing on the UI, and Zeynep is currently working on integrating some of the feedback. Overall, the users were happy with our interface and were able to navigate it with ease. We have also been working on completing the mechanics of the device, which includes laser printing the box, establishing the tension system, and integrating the hardware and software. As of right now we have established the web-app to solenoid pipeline and are currently working on integrating the stepper motors. In the upcoming weeks, our primary focus will be integrating all of the sub-systems and testing our embosser.