For this week the interactive presentations were about the same as last week. They all used the same type of interactive properties and were only different mainly with the topics.

This week for our project I had the part of starting to teach the other members how to golf so that I could get a basis of where everyone was at with their skill levels. Some members were better than others but it is for sure something to work off of. No one in this group is unteachable because you can see that everyone wants to work on it and improve. Teaching is something that I like to do especially when it comes to a topic that I love, like golf. The teaching aspect is also something that helps keep myself in check whenever I play. I also determined when the best nights it would be for us to meet together as a team for our learning or practice sessions. This is a great and cooperating group so that also for sure helps as not having a group who is willing to work or compromise about something sure does make it difficult. Next week I believe we present our own interactive websites that we found so next weeks post will be about that rather than other people websites that they found.

Something I saw that I really liked and want to use came from the interactive website that went in depth about the various endangered animal species. For each species, it gave a graphic and a brief description of what the animal, and that was it on the main page. Then, you had several once you clicked on the animal to learn more information, it opened up a variety of different kinds of content for that animal; statistics, videos, and more information pertaining to that species, how and why the species is declining, what needs to be done about it, etc.

Due to 5 Guys and our project of learning how to play golf, I think this is a strategy we can use to really make our website as good as we can. I think we can use this strategy by each having a “profile” on the website, which when you click on it, opens up too much more information about that individual team member and their progression in the game of golf over the lessons we had.

This week, our group hit the Golf Simulator on East Campus and started training/collecting content for our project. We were all there for nearly two hours, and I was able to get some good video of each team member being coached and critiqued in the areas they needed it.

I was sick this week for the presentations so I missed those. However this week our group met up at the east campus rec center to take some swings in the golf simulator to assess where we all are skill wise as well as capture some of our early media. We wanted to capture this early media to show our start point and where we are at the beginning of the semester compared to the end. The weather is starting to get nice fast so that is very good news for our group. Hopefully we can start getting outside to the driving range and on the course so we can capture that media. It would also be nice to get out of the simulator because all though it is nice it is just not the same as hitting the actual grass. That is still just the main thing i’m worried about for our project is mother nature deciding to give us one last bit of winter and us being stuck inside.

This week we were all able to meet up at the golf sim on East Campus which turned out great. We all know where we are at, I personally am not the best at golf to say the least but I had fun with it and look forward to practicing more. I didn’t realize how fun golf actually is and I’m eager to keep practicing. We also got all of our media for next week, and during our practice we brainstormed some ideas for our website like different types of interactions we’ll include.

I’m thinking that we’ll probably hit the sim up a few more times before we go to a real course. By that time we should all be confident enough. The idea we had for our website was to use the footage of where we all started out, whether its beginner level or more advanced, and show the progression through an individual interview. This will add some interest to our project and give some good information.

Some ideas I’ve had for our website are using some of the designs and animations we’ve seen from the interactive websites and implement that in our website (our own animated logo, moving background, lots of buttons, etc). The creativity of that will be really fun. As of right now we’ll probably just keep practicing and getting more media to use for our website, and eventually conduct interviews that we’ll use to measure each of our progression rates.

The interactive project presentations were very good this week and the bar was set high for these projects. From these projects I learned that for out interactive project we need to have multiple aspects to our interactive project to make it perfect. For ours I would really like to find a way to be able to be able to make a map to take one of our holes that we play and to locate where our best shots go and do a beginning to end to show progress.

I feel that there needs to be an interactive aspect about the course that we play and have interactive videos of some of the staff or other players of the course. I felt that some of the interactive websites did not have enough still images and maybe needed some to be able to just glance and look at something deeply. We would like to incorporate as many interactive aspects as we can but do not want to overload it so that there is things to be able to read and it will make it easier to follow along. The interactive part of websites I feel are some of the coolest aspects of any part of a project.

This week I did not present my interactive presentation, however I did see some things that could be useful in our project. Obviously the main media like photo, video, audio, etc. But also I think a set up like the tornado one where there were chapters would be cool to do for us but holes at the course instead of chapters since ours is about golf. A big thing that stuck out to me was just how complicated and cool all the stories looked but yet were so easy to navigate so I think we really need to pay attention the navigation in ours. of Obviously the main problem we had in class was audio not working so we are going too have to watch for that a double check that it works right and is compatible with the technology in the lab.

Again this week we haven’t done a whole lot, we just planned out days we are going to meet up to go to the simulator and work on our projects. The days are starting to get nicer so i think we will be able to get out on an actual course sooin and start capturing media.

The main thing I learned from the presentations that took place this week, the one key main component that I found is consistent with an effective storytelling website is modernization. What I mean by this is that all the websites presented were done in such a way that I was intrigued to see what was coming next. It was very visually appealing. I want to really cash in on making some futuristic cool transitions and animations. I liked how there were several different programmed paths within each web site and it made the presentation feel so much more interactive. One problem I noticed in some of the projects is that there were problems with audio or video displaying on the site. While I am not completely sure if this was due to the UNL computers having glitchs or the website itself, it just reinforces the fact that we need to make sure that our media displays as seamlessly as possible on our project. If the media has errors or will not display correctly, all the hard work we will put in will have been for nothing.

For this week, we figured out when we are going to work on collecting media, which will mostly be on the weekends. A challenge that we incurred was the fact that we have schedules that can vary from week to week so that may make it tough to get a consistent schedule, but weekends will be our best bet for working going forward.

I did not present in class this week, but it was really cool to see the variety of interactive websites that my classmates presented on. One thing that really resonated with me was interviews with the people who were the subjects of the interviews or sites. I am a very people-oriented person, so elements like an interview, telling a story, etc. makes something like that much more personable, and for me, much more interesting and engaging. Another thing I liked is how clean most of the home pages were with just a few options that, when clicked on, opened whole new specific areas to investigate. I think with our project, because we will be tracking our progression at learning golf, and learning how to play in a lot of different ways and environments, this will be a great strategy for 5 Guys to incorporate. Seeing some examples of these websites got me, and the rest of my group, really thinking about how we want to approach our project, and got me excited for the path ahead. 

This week, our group was very active in communicating, as we are going to start collecting content this week. We have begun planning meeting times, locations, which equipment we will need, etc. to make sure we can hit the ground running and work efficiently on this project. 

This week was pretty relaxed in terms of how much work our group has done so far this week. We plan on practicing our golfing skills this weekend so that will help for preparation for the final project. After the first day of interactive website presentations I think its safe to say everyone got a lot of inspiration from all the websites shown. The one I liked the most was Climber, and although nobody in 5 guys is that wizard-like at coding it still gives me some things to go off of.

I would definitely like to be the one behind all of the web development for our group. Like I’ve said in previous blog posts, it’s more like everyone pitches in as opposed to different tasks assigned to different people so I will have help with the website. But at the same time we are all giving ourselves the freedom to choose what we want to do. Anyway, I don’t know for sure if I’ll want to code the website or use a drag and drop, but I think either way it will be fun. I know that some other drag and drop sites I’ve seen allow you to do some coding.

Some ideas I’ve thought about for the website are interactive pictures, videos and different graphics. It’s just as simple as clicking on something and that thing transferring the user to another page. I think that’d be a good place to start in terms of adding interactivity to our website. I look forward to finding my own interactive website to present, and after seeing what others have found I’ll go into it looking for something that is applicable to my group and it has elements I can more or less use to make it into my own.

Well through four weeks we have finally started working on figuring what to do next to be able to start this project. Some of the things that we need to figure out are what equipment do we need and what do we need to do to get that. For the project we need to have some photo components, some video components and much more.

For the video part of the project we will check a video camera and be able to film some clips by either giving a prospective from the ground or setting up with a tripod. The courses that we go to have given the okay to be able to film on their courses. For the photo component of the project, we can check out cameras for photos. While the four others are doing there practicing/ playing I can take a few pictures and then go back to instructing. For video it will be best for the tripod because it will allow me to be able to also instruct or help while it records.

Checking for media quality will be done be making sure that we have the cameras on the right digital settings (right types of files and and things done in the menus), followed by us looking and checking visuals and audios settings whenever needed.