Creative Computing has given me the opportunity to build a creative utility. I had one goal going into this semester in this course and that was to build a device that I could use every day. Even though, many of my peers were aiming for games or visualizers there is only so much of a use for products like that. When we set out to form groups, I wanted to find people that would want to create something that can be used and be helpful. When I found likeminded individuals, the next process was figuring out how we could all collaborate on an idea that suited all of us. We all brainstormed, and we couldn’t form an idea that really stood out to us. I wanted to incorporate some sort of music aspect into this product, while my other partners were set on a location-based app. We blended all our ideas and decided to make a mood detector that would create playlists for an individual depending on numerous variables that we would be tracking. We had expectations on having a seamless app that would keep track of a user’s heartrate and depending on how its beat pattern and how many calories they burned, steps they’ve taken, location they’re at we could give them at least a couple options that would narrow down their mood for us. Unfortunately, our group did not realize that we could not track heart rate in the background all day long. That technology is only available in very specific watches that we could not get access to. So, we couldn’t accomplish our goal with any accuracy whatsoever. Tracking an individual’s mood alone would have been a very difficult task to try to accomplish, but when we could only track their heartbeat only by a manual button push it made an unfeasible idea. These things were something my group and I wished we knew before we set out to do this idea. We burned a lot of time going towards a dead end and limited ourselves. After abandoning our idea, we had a time crunch over us and we had immense pressure to produce something that was feasible to accomplish and incorporate some of our old code so we didn’t have to lose all of our progress thus far. I believe this really helped us produce an idea that may be simple but could have turned out fantastic if we would have started on this earlier. We brainstormed and came up with an app idea that was unique to all of us. While still using the Google Fit API that we were using on our previous idea. New ideas were sprouted such as background change depending on weather, Bitmoji timeline that would show a user how far long they are in their training. We also thought of unique workout regiments that were specialized for beginner runners.
I think one thing I took out of Creative Computing is the ability to come up with idea’s is better done under pressure with numerous constraints on you. At the beginning of the semester we had the capabilities to do whatever we wanted to do with any which way. I believe this hurt our brainstorming sessions. We had too many options and thus every idea was very flawed. Only when we narrowed down our idea for a very specific cause did creative ideas begin to flow. Narrowing down the scope of our program let us laser in on the idea and create unique thoughts on a generic running app. I believe this message was stated in several articles throughout the semester as well. Where constraints were given to produce more creative products. This concept was very weird to wrap my head around at first because I thought an individual would be far more creative if they had a bigger scope to work with. As I was working on my project, I found it the opposite as I mentioned earlier. So that was an interesting lesson that was learned in the classroom and through experience as well.
Overall, I thought this class was very interesting and I learned a lot of interesting ideas about ambiguity and creativity. The research paper that we had to present was actually something that I wasn’t looking forward to but it was more enjoyable than I thought. The only thing I would change about the layout of this course would be more teacher/group meetings. I think with semester long projects even though milestones gave students hard deadlines to meet minimum requirement when it comes to project building having a one on one with the professor would have been useful.