tl;dr; Students will develop a working prototype or intervention based on ideas introduced in the course. The prototype should be accompanied by clear documentation; to include technical implementation (code, design files), need, strategy and use case (explanation, rationale for solution).

Creative Projects

As part of this course, you’re asked to self-select an idea for a web-delivered micro-service that you’re excited to make real. Once we’ve covered the basics, this course will give you the opportuntity to make your own products and services. You’ll have a mid-way project and an end-of-semester project.

For these projects, you get to make whatever you want (so long as it fits the brief!). Your web app could solve a problem you care, it could be a chance to discover or realize a passion project, to build an idea you want to take to market or out into the world or just to make something silly and rediculous. This gives you a lot of opportunity to build a great project for your portfolio, and to help develop your software skills through something you give a damn about!

Learning Objective

As part of the exercise, students will:

• Rapidly prepare a ‘minimum viable product’ / prototype for a web-delivered product or service;
• Become familiar with the concepts surrounding zero-UI web services by building them;
• Learn to design, develop and deploy simple lightweight online product and services prototypes;
• Learn to work indepdendently to prepare a functional and interactive prototype of an online product or service.

Deliverables:

Specific deliverables will be covered in the assignment descriptions, but these projects will require the following to be delivered:

• A deployed (live) web application that anyone can interact with through the web
• Code for the application
• Documentation of the project (contributed to the Gallery).

Grading

• For the mid-way, 15% of total grade.
• For the end-of semester project, 30% of total grade.

A strong grade will result by create interesting, well-crafted and well documented projects. Full details can be found in the Grading, Feedback and Policies section

A note

Each creative project will be accompanied with a written description. This is a starting point for your exploration. They aren’t designed to, nor will they, provide a template for things you need to do to get 100%. Please don’t treat them like this. Instead, they are prompts meant to get you thinking. You should interpret them and approach them creatively. You are strongly encouraged to think beyond what’s written.

Submitting your work:

You’ll submit your work as follows:

• Code will be posted to your student folder on GitHub. Issue a pull request when completed.
• Documentation should be posted to the Gallery.

Choosing a project

The possibilities are far and wide. The main thing is to choose something you care about. Having a project that’s genuinely interesting to you is going to be best. Keep in mind that it should be reasonably well scoped i.e. something small, discrete and easy to implement well in a tight turnaround. Don’t try to boil oceans, identify a small solvable problem (i.e. micro-interaction). Keep it constrained but conceptually interesting. From there there’s lots of options.

1. Build out an idea from previous course: Was there a project you worked on (individually or collaboratively) that you really liked the idea of? Maybe you’d like to revisit it?

2. Open source/Homage Is there a really cool idea that you love? Why not try and replicate it or make it ope source? This would make a great way to focus on learning new technical skills without having to worry too much about designing the experience, functionality or features - you’d just copy. For example:

   • You could try and recreate Call Frank for yourself and build a Twilio bot that calls and transcribes your daily reflections?
   • You could recreate SlashGif and build a twitter bot that looks up photos for you? or
   • You could reinvent Birdly and build a slackbot that’ll take care of your accounts.
   • Take a look at the Resources section or through our discoveres and find something awesome to build

3. Make Something strange/left-of-center/weird. You could make a playful, poetic or strange interaction on the web

   • Pentametron is literally poetic. It makes iambic pentameter from pairs of tweets. Could you do something similar?
   • @NYTMinusContext finds bizarre tweetable 140 character chunks of New York Times articles and then shares them with the world; without the context of their headline or article.
   • Or you can get snarky and write a bot to point out typos and grammatical errors, just like @StealthMountain

4. Make something that solves a problem you care about Did you know, bots can be used for social good too?

   • HelloVote is a bot that can help you check if you’re registered to vote and can get you set up if you aren’t
   • @ILCampaignCash tweets everytime a campaign contribution more than $1k is made in Illinois while @dirtywatervt let’s residents of Vermont know about sewage spills.
   • A legal bot, DoNotPay helped contest 160,000 parking tickets and save people over $4m in parking fines in just 21 months. *

5. Make something you’d want to pay money for Simple as that, what would you buy as a product if it was avilable tomorrow? What do you think you could make money from? Is there an idea for a product, device or interactive thing that’s been in the back of your mind for a while? Now’s the time to make it.