#flourishingfutures

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

Reflection

In conclusion this activity has now come to an end and i will now evaluate my participation and this CAS activity in general.

Personal Role

In this activity, i was the one with the least amount of experience in writing code. I had only started to learn out of interest as the peers around me, Aadi and Bandi were really interested and knowledgable in this area. In order to feel less left out, i had began to learn code, only to be recommended by my enthusiastic friends to do this CAS activity. 

The gap in knowledge of code writing between me and my friends were at first clearly visible and could be even argued that i was dragging them down. This not only made me feel bad about joining this activity, it also fuelled my desire to improve myself in writing this new language. 

Later in the activity, i had noticed that my skills had actually improved. From the start where i made a amazingly horrid looking website to making a very complex photo viewer, i was very surprised not only by my own skills improvement, but also by the improvement in skills or their already existing skills in my peers.

The most help i could provide for my group was make a photo viewer, choosing a background for the website, the logo redesign and small notes in how to improve the website. Aadi and Bandi did a lot of the code writing for the main website functions. However i still believe that i did well in participating in this project.

Overview of the project

This project was defiantly a activity that opened up a whole new world to me. I believe i underestimated the knowledge and skills required to write code. For things varying from games to websites, the sheer knowledge and time that is needed to make all the features work on websites like youtube or google. 

Our website in comparisons was smaller in features than thought. I was very satisfied with our final product. The most help i could provide for my group was a picture viewer, background and notes on everything else. So seeing Bandi and Aadi create something i could not understand amazed me to a great extent. 

The website had a basic green navigation bar next to the flourishing futures logo. The background was a picture of the Mongolian mountains and sky with a horse and a ger. I thought this background picture would be a good way give the feeling of an authentic Mongolian NGO. 

Other main features included the login for admins and members to a calendar planner by google docs where they can login, chat and create schedules. Whilst also including a small facebook like button at the bottom right that linked it with the flourishing futures facebook page.

Conclusions

However the project was ultimately scrapped by Flourishing futures with an email. This came as a large disappointment to us but was understandable. I realize that our website in comparison to other websites was very amateur. The difference could clearly be seen and choosing a actual firm that does this as a living is much more convenient. 

Personally i think flourishing futures had changed their minds or started to doubt themselves at the the meeting. I suspect that they expected a much more better website to be presented to them during that meeting. However at that time, our website was very basic and even though we had asked for suggestions on improvement, they might have thought twice. 

I can also understand their rejection on terms of skill and experience we had. We were very limited in knowledge in this project but that was what made us want to learn more and perform better, more specifically me. 

I had sometimes felt that if my knowledge of html was greater, i could have helped my teammates to a greater extent and that could have made flourishing futures think twice about rejecting us.

However i did learn to a greater extent of something i had no experience in to making small codes. I think i improved greatly. In the case of doing this activity again, i would try and put more effort into learning more about this new world of knowledge

Learning outcome conditions

Increase our awareness of our own strengths and areas for growth

Undertake new challenges

Planned and Initiated activities

Worked and collaborated with others

Showed perseverance

Engaged with issue of global importance

Considered ethical implications

Developed new skills

I believe i had accomplished a majority of the learning outcomes mentioned in my proposal. The areas in which i believe i did not meet fully is worked and collaborated with others learning condition fully met. I had limited knowledge in this activity, thus could not help or talk with my teammates that well. 

Another learning outcome i believe i did not fully accomplish is perseverance. I believe that i could have done better or learnt more if i had put in more perseverance into this activity. Perhaps if i had given even more commitment and learned more, it might have made the website better and this might have kept us in touch with flourishing futures.

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

Making the photo gallery

To do this Bandi had suggested that i use this website as a basis to make the photo viewer. It was called galleria. 

I knew basic things from my learning such as starting and ending everything of with 

<html> 

and in between i would have the 

<head>

</head>

<body>

</body>

<html>

Since they supplied that program and the some code this was what i was supposed to implement

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.js"></script>

So it ended with that line of script in between. I had to download the files they provide as this was leading to it i think.

So so far it kind of looked like this 

<html> <head> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.js"></script> </head> <body> <script> $("body").text("jQuery works"); </script> </body> </html>

One of the good things about this was that the website also gave some instructions to me to make it work.

After they wanted me to add this script

<script> if (Galleria) { $("body").text('Galleria works') } </script>

This was to link the files downloaded to the photo viewer, since the whole galleria themes are based on the files downloaded

The dimensions were kind of weird, and the next step was exactly that, setting up dimensions, the default one they provided was this 

<style> #galleria{ width: 700px; height: 400px; background: #000 } </style>

After the inputing it looked about normal, but now i needed images and according to the instructions it said to input the pictures through this method

<div id="galleria"> <img src="photo1.jpg"> <img src="photo2.jpg"> <img src="photo3.jpg"> </div>

I had to put the image name in the "photo1.jpg" part to change the titles. I showed it to Bandi and he said where is the viewer, i needed to apply the theme now which i used this line of script

<script> Galleria.loadTheme('galleria/themes/classic/galleria.classic.min.js'); Galleria.run("#galleria"); </script>

This was between the <body> part of the code, thus under the <head> part, a lower section and the finished product looked like this

<html> <head> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.js"></script> <script src="galleria/galleria-1.2.7.min.js"></script> <style> #galleria{ width: 700px; height: 400px; background: #000; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="galleria"> <img src="photo1.jpg"> <img src="photo2.jpg"> <img src="photo3.jpg"> </div> <script> Galleria.loadTheme('galleria/themes/classic/galleria.classic.min.js'); Galleria.run("#galleria"); </script> </body> </html>

I do have to say though, it did not look as good as i thought it would, and there was the problem of the information of the picture being only viewed by clicking the "i" button.

The website was called

http://www.galleria.io/

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

Side note

After we had finished our meeting with the representatives from flourishing futures, we had asked one of the representatives, the Mongolian one, if she could be our supervisor for this activity. After explaining what she had to do, she agreed and we gave them our phone number. She also talked about not wanting to be noticed much by the Mongolian government with the website by not giving out too much information about themselfs

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

The meeting

WOW, that was one long meeting. Just to make sure we made a good impression and not be late, our group had arrived at the designated meeting location at 3pm. While waiting for an hour and 10 min probably, our group had ordered some food and drinks and just casually conversed as we awaited the arrival of the representatives of flourishing futures.

Eventually they had arrived and the representative, had brought a Mongolian colleague with her. We found this opportunity to be quite useful as we were looking for our supervisor still and we had asked her to be our supervisor. She agreed. 

When the meeting had started first we took out Aadi's computer and showed them our current design of our web design. Initially they had no reaction and they were just looking. A solid minute or two was spent with our group waiting in anticipation as they had judged our website design. 

After quite some time looking at it, they had exchanged with each other a few words before telling us our website design was OK. 

Furthermore they told us what they wanted in the website which included

Less content

No pictures

Staff area want file sharing

Group calendar

Login

They said they wanted these items on their website and after talking with each other, knowing this was going to be hard to fulfill, our group said that we can make it work and asked them to send us content they wanted to put on the website.

After we had exchanged our goodbye's our group let out the formality and spent some time in the cafe to converse even more and eventually left for our separate ways. 

This meeting showed us what they wanted and what needs to be done and really gave us a template of a sort to work on while working on the website.

[khubcas]

Flourishing futures

Before the meeting

On Dec 4th, our meeting with one of the representatives form flourishing futures would be conducted at cafe ti amo. This is a very crucial event for us in this CAS activity, and we needed to make a good impression. I had further started learn from my website, and our group met everyday at school and talked and tried to work on our website design for the interest of flourishing futures. I hope that this will prove to be good in good faith as we had spent more time on the webdesign

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

Email

Today Bandi had received an email from the one of the contacts we had from flourishing futures, finally. We had been trying to contact them and now they have contacted us. The email firstly stated an apology for the long waited response and asked us what we wanted to do. We explained the basics for our idea of the Flourishing futures website, and asked if we could have a meeting with them. The contact had agreed and given us a number to contact with while we gave her the meetings location, cafe ti amo near the circus. This meeting was made in order for us to discuss what they had wanted for the website and get some thoughts on our current website from someone from the actual foundation.

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

Learning web design

I have now further learnt the needed requirements for web design. I just learnt how to use this margin thing that helps you put a specific objects location on the web. This will come in handy as i could not do that before and the background is looking very nice from all the work.

[khubcas]

Flourishing Futures

Selecting a background picture

This was not a very difficult task for me to do. I had done a brief google search and various other pictures websites for possible backgrounds in our website. Initially none had really shown much process but after an hour of searching i had found a very nice picture. It showed a picture of the Mongolian countryside. I though it was appropriate as flourishing futures was a NGO where it was based on helping Mongolian poverty. The blue skies also fit in quite nicely with the context of the website that our group had created. Furthermore this background picture was like by all of us in the group, as i showed it to them and they had nodded their heads in approval and it will be the background picture for our website.