Presentation Preparation Finished

I have just finished creating the slides for the summative assessment. Adapting from the formative slides, a few are the same but most have been edited or completely changed. A few new sections have been added in, the most funny of which is the ‘Scenarios’ slide. Detailing a series of events about the txt alert part of our concept works. Taken in 5 minutes with a camera phone and a further 5 minutes Photoshop time, they’re not the best work I’ve done but I think the rough edges adds to the charm of the story.

Flo also wants us to create a sentence to describe our project so I might add that in to one of the first slides. The very first tag line I came up with seems to work ok in this context so here it is again.

“Real-Time Route Planner: Saving The World, One Stop At A Time”

Here is the presentation. I have to say thank you to Fraser Ferguson for stepping in last minute and being an actor for us.

Getting There…

Today started by playing around with various databases to be able to connect, retrieve data and add data. After a few teething problems (me not knowing anything) I was able to add information to a database and retrieve it. Yay.

Dave and James kindly worked out a way to simulate the journey planner. From that I was able to use the database to contain names of stations and whether they are ‘on’ or ‘off’, to show if there are delays as it would in the concept.

I introduced a form to change the status in the database to simulate a real-time update.

Then I used a lot of ‘if’ statements to display an image instead of a station name depending on the status of that station.

Here are a few screen shots.

Formative Presentation

I was expecting the presentation to be inclusive of other members of the class, but no it was just each group or individual with Flo and Dave. Valid feedback was received and the main thing I got out of it was that our idea (Myself and Robert Andre) is very VERY large in scope and we need to refine down each aspect we want to present. Flo made a good point that we should present as if we were pitching to TFL and not only to someone with technical understanding but also to someone who could potentially buy the idea of us.

With this information we have decided on 4 things to prepare for our final presentation (even though they are slightly off brief).

1. Plan a route through multiple points (done but with manual if statements).
2. Create a flash animation of what the interface will look like and what information it displays.
3. Have a small demo video showing real-time implementation of an SMS text based system.
4. Have an image map that allows the user to select the route directly (might have to be a flash file rather than php as I can’t get the selection to input the data into a ‘$_GET’ field.

Here’s the presentation we used for the formative anyway.

Changing The World…

This is the sub title for our new brief. Using PHP and content management systems, how would we change the world? This struck me as odd… as I have a little experience with PHP and MySQL I was struggling to understand how I could change the world using such technologies. I had no ideas about what to do and was really stumped.

Until, that is, today when we had a very informal brain storming session which I found very useful. As it turns out I was thinking in a very limited fashion and after speaking to Robert Andre I realised the scope of what we could do. Robert asked me to join him in his venture and after mulling over in my head how it might be possible I gladly accepted.

It will be a real challenge not only in the overall way information is gained and used but also because we are hand coding PHP - something which I have never done but always wanted to know how.

The general overview is a form of public transport navigation in real-time using updates from various sources to change times / fares / journeys.

Off the top of my head the tag line for this should be:

“CHANGING THE WORLD - ONE STOP AT A TIME”