Blog Posts

Week 15: Final Design Review, The End

This week Team Stratagem presented at our Final Design Review, the capstone of the past two semesters. We reviewed our presentation and material last week, and also met on the Sunday and Monday beforehand to rehearse our presentation. At our table in the main ballroom we had a monitor projecting a live demonstration of our application and an amazing printed-out poster that Caleigh designed and had printed for us.

Final Design Review: Presentation

** Uploaded as PDF because PPTX format was too big.

Final Design Review: Video

Final Design Review: Poster

Week 14: Peer Review and Preparing for The End

This week Team Stratagem finished improvements to our application, drafted our written reports, recorded our demonstration video, and presented our presentation for a peer review. On Sunday we recorded our demonstration video to simply explain the problem we were presented with and our solution to it. A still of the video is below. We then prepared the technical presentation we will give next week and presented it to a peer review viewing on Tuesday. After that we completed the drafts of the written documents we will submit with our application next week. Throughout the week members of our team worked tirelessly to fix bugs and unintended functionality in our application. Next week we will present our past year of work and send off our application to our sponsor.

Week 13: FDR Materials Preparation

Hello everyone, and welcome to week 13! This week, Team Stratagem deployed and demonstrated our live web app to our liaisons, while also preparing our Final Design Review materials. These materials include a video of our product, a report for our liaisons, and a presentation for FDR day. On the technical side, we collected structured CAE user feedback by distributing the live deployment and Microsoft Forms feedback survey to potential users, establishing a measurable input channel to guide final UI and feature prioritization. We also filmed a draft of our final video, seen below. As you can see, we were in desperate need of props! Stay tuned to see our final FDR poster and video in the coming weeks!

Week 12: Prototype Inspection Day

Welcome to week 12! This week, Team Stratagem presented a successful presentation at Prototype Inspection Day. We received great feedback from over 5 judges, who also had the opportunity to test our product live and in person. To prepare for this presentation, we iterated on core UI updates and configured a locally hosted version of our web application, while also preparing a slide deck. Overall, the event was a major success, and we’ll be using the feedback we received to deliver a great final presentation at FDR day!

Week 11: Welcome Back and Prototype Preparation

Welcome back everyone! We are over two thirds of the way through the semester and over five sixths of the way through the IPPD program. Last week was our spring break which is why there is no blog post. This week Team Stratagem continued working on our final reports, began working on our presentation video, uploaded our application to a website hosting service to allow for user testing, and also prepared for our Prototype Inspection Day next week.

Week 9: CAE Site Visit and User Testing

This week Team Stratagem visited CAE’s Tampa headquarters to present our current progress and receive feedback on what we should improve or implement. We met with each other several times beforehand to prepare and discuss how we would conduct user testing. At this moment our application is a web application that is run using Node.js from a computer, and only reliably works when accessed from the same computer or network that Node.js is running on. At CAE, we had the opportunity to meet with a project manager and have her use our application and provide live feedback. We learned some important information about the context of our project and important feedback regarding our current implementation. First, we learned that CAE acquired and merged with an aviation simulator company in Texas a few years ago and merged their project managers. As a result their Texas and Tampa offices have different approaches to scheduling projects and our solution should be able to handle both of them. We also received feedback about our user interface, with a major oversight being a lack of user accessibility which we will address soon. Going forward we will fix functional and user experience issues and will also make our application be reliably accessible from different computers to facilitate further asynchronous user testing.

Week 8: Sponsor Visit Preparation

We are officially over half way through the semester! This week Team Stratagem prepared to present our current application to project managers at CAE next week and began working on our Final Design Review documents. Next week we will travel to CAE’s Tampa headquarters to meet with project managers in person to listen to their scheduling problems, present our current progress, and get feedback on our implementation’s successes and shortcomings. This week we improved the calendar view and added new buttons to easily select all weekdays, then remove preset holidays. After our Friday meeting, we will be implementing CAE’s “every other Friday off” shortened workweek, and also will be focusing on the initial process of turning a Bill of Materials into a preliminary schedule.