Resources: Buddy Groups Project
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Code Your Future provides trainees with the opportunity to be mentored by professionals in the tech industry. As professionals, you will need to work in cross functional teams in order to deliver a successful product and to communicate to your clients.
In small groups, your challenge is to collaborate and work on a product and pitch your product to a fictional client. You will collaborate and build an MVP (minimum viable product). Your product must have a positive impact in the world or solve a global challenge: for example you might choose to build a website that provides information on how to grow your own food.
Note that:
This is not a technical challenge - this is about your collaboration, team work, time management skills.
You only need to use your existing skills, no need to agonize over the technical aspects. You will have the capacity to add new features to your product as you progress in the software development course.
Once you have built your product as a group, you will need to make a group presentation and discuss how the roles you will have researched contributed to the product. For example, a UX/UI designer would think about how a user would interact with the product or the back end developer would work with the data.
You will have 8 weeks to complete this project. You will work with your team during the Saturday sessions. You will have a PD mentor to help you with your project.
Week 1-3: Discovery and team planning
Week 4-6: Product Development and test
Week 7-8: Presentation preparation
Things to consider:
How will you communicate as a group?
How will you plan as a group?
How will you assign technical tasks?
How will you manage conflict?
How will you present your pitch?
How will you research your role?
How will you allocate enough time ?
Week 1: Team-planning
You must discuss your strengths and weaknesses, and how you will work together as a team. You must discuss all of the possible ways your group could have conflicts and discuss what you will do to overcome the conflicts as a team. You must make a plan.
Do you understand the challenge? What is being asked of you?
What else do you need to know to get started?
Who might you need to talk to?
How will you work together as a team?
How will you work together ?
How will you plan?
Now that you understand your problem and have more information, what will you do next?
What sort of ideas would you like to try?
What would benefit you as a learner?
Week 2: Research
Research the agile manifesto and discuss the 4 key principles of agile in your groups.
Research the roles below:
Front end web developer
Back end web developer
UX/UI designer or UX researcher
Product manager
QA tester
Once you have researched the roles, create a one-slide presentation explaining what each of the roles do and how these roles work together in a team on a project. Once you have created your presentation you must work with your buddy group and allocate roles to each other based on your strengths and development areas.
Week 3: Gathering requirements
You now have some ideas you think may work. How do you decide the best one? Have you met all the requirements? How will you create an MVP?
Week 4-6: Develop/Test
It is time to decide what you want to do with your MVP.
Once you come up with a global issue, you should prepare a professional document that you would make to pitch your idea. Imagine you are part of a web development team and pitching this idea to your boss.
Week 7-8 Delivery
You will prepare a presentation of your work to the rest of the cohort. How will you structure your presentations? Who will do what?
Retrospective
On the final week following the presentations, you will have some time to discuss as a class what your experience was like during the project.
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