Hello all, or shouldâve I say goodbye, well for now at least. It is finally summer break and I am so happy!!! But of course, PLP being what it is we have to do one final piece of homework. Iâm gonna let you guess what kind of homework. Yep! Itâs a blog post! (Once again a slightly sarcastic exclamation point) Anyway, the topic in question is Blue Sky. This years final maker project was all about us choosing a problem or issue that we want to try our best to fix. Big companies like Google put 20% of their employees work time towards free work period and âgenius hoursâ in which employees can choose to peruse any project they have. This is how things like gmail were born. This year at our spring exhibition we presented our very own blue sky products and our steps towards completion, otherwise know as the LAUNCH.
WikiImages / Pixabay
  Ok so what does a LAUNCH look like. With each letter in the word comes a step going forward in our project. Iâm going too start with the beginning of course. Look, listen, and learn. With the first step we had one simple task, think about a problem and how you are going to fix it. We started with some questions and a how might we paragraph. After heavy consideration and a bunch of switching from idea to idea, I decided to work with my own problem. Being what I consider as an athlete I tend to get hurt a lot. From strains to sprains I hate that the only thing that I really had to rely on was chemically induced products like heat rub which are horrible for you body. After talking with some people in my class whom also are affected by this issue I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask more questions outside of the teenage rage. This is where asking tons of questions, step 2 comes in. As you might know from some of my previous posts, asking questions through need to know charts are a very common concept in PLP. You can see some of my need to knows below but I will warn you that these were not entirely based on questions surrounding my project but the entirety of how blue sky works.
  At this point we had to have a pretty solid idea for our pitch forms. Once I got approved I moved on to the U stage. Understand the problem or process is where we started to do primary and secondary research. This is the point in which I started to fumble. After doing my honestly kind of lazy attempt at primary research, which is asking real people that would benefit or be knowledgeable about a product such as yours, I got feedback on how I needed to redo this part. I decided to contact a company that specializes stretching and healing sports injuries. Kinstretch did not however get back to me, even after I tried and tried again to contact them via email, live chat, and phone call. Since my U stage wasnât the best I moved on to N as fast as I could. Navigating through idea can be challenging, but try having very little to go on and it gets much harder. I somehow found a way of bunching my ideas and cutting down to a final decision. I was going to make an app targeted at teen athletes. Once I had a conversation with my teacher I was introduced to app prototyping in keynote. This saved me so much time and taught me things I probably never wouldâve figured out if Iâd made a website or something of the sort. But with such little time and lots of information to input I needed to slim down my ideas. I chose to target three things. Fitness, stretching, and healing. On to C…
  Okay, the creative stage in this long process was probably the most enjoyable because I got to stress test my idea to people who would benefit it. Then I got a lot of feedback which kept me working for days leading up the the exhibition. I honestly feel like if I had done more to make what I made even better, I wouldâve been happier with it in the end. I had a lot of ideas that werenât realistic in the time period of one week. However I pulled through and I fixed a lot of little things which made my app prototype better in the long run. You can check out my LAUNCH presentation below! Before you go and do that I want to say that I have some big goals for the next blue sky project, they are quiet frequent around these parts. Although I wasnât super proud of what I made, I did pretty good for my first blue sky and all that I can do in the future is improve!
https://youtu.be/42Cw1RSwYVk
– Ciara âď¸
