This week, we reached a major milestone by presenting our SLDR to our liaisons, Alex and Bobby, as well as senior RTX employees Cathy and Sylvia. It was a great session where we successfully showcased the design solution we’ve been developing to address the problem statement this semester. With the design phase largely behind us, we are eager to shift gears and look forward to actually building and implementing the solution next semester!

This week, Credential Core focused on preparing for our SLDR. We completed a full draft of the SLDR document and slide deck, then delivered our SLDR practice presentation at the PR SLDR session, where we both gave and received feedback from other teams. This feedback helped us pinpoint which sections of our rough draft and slides still need refinement and what we should prioritize over break. Moving forward, we’ll be finishing the SLDR document and polishing the presentation, as well as spinning up a Windows Server VM in the Hatchery to begin building out our environment. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue getting ready for our SLDR!

This week, Credential Core had both our Prototype Inspection Day (PID) and our visit to Largo, FL to present our PDR! In preparation for both of these events, we put significant effort into getting our prototype and presentation ready.

On Tuesday, the team gathered for PID. We were able to present our current prototype to 6 different judges, which lead to a variety of good feedback on our frontend and backend.

On Thursday, the team drove down to RTX in Largo, Fl to present our PDR. Everyone had a fantastic time sharing our hard work with RTX and seeing the cool projects other teams are working on. During our visit, we received great feedback and comments on our current design choices. We enjoyed talking to our executive sponsor and liaisons, and look forward to our next meeting!

Currently, the team is working towards getting our development environment set up in the Innovation Hub and working on our SLDR. Stay tuned!

This week our team has been hard at work in preparation for our upcoming Prototype Inspection Day (11/04) and RTX site visit and PDR presentation (11/06). These days represent significant milestones for our group, and we have put a considerable amount of time into getting ourselves and our materials ready. Our prototype, a Figma representation of our front-end, now has 29 distinct pages and more are planned. This comprehensive prototype allows our team to present an full-coverage application on P.I.D. and receive useful feedback. This feedback will help us make adjustments and provide the best possible user experience.

Our team is taking two rental cars down to Largo, FL this coming Thursday, so stay tuned for that exciting update! We will be sure to include several pictures of the experience and write all about it.

We have a new work space! This week we held two meetings within RTX’s room at the UF Innovation Center. We even participated in our first building pizza party.

We have been hard at work constructing our prototype and user stories ahead of our Prototype Inspection Day (November 4) at the Reitz Union. We are diving into the details of our project to construct visual interfaces that users can understand and easily manage records with. Another group is working on user stories to ensure a coherent workflow for our eventual user base. We hope to access gain access to RTX’s computers and servers as soon as Monday and get a headstart on the foundation of our awesome program! Big things are on the horizon for Team Credential Core, stay tuned for what is to come.

This week we virtually presented our Preliminary Design Review to our liaisons Alex and Bobby!

Our team has the unique opportunity to present twice – the first time virutally and the second time in person. We spent the whole week making updates to our PDR document and presentation according to feedback from our coach and peers.

The changes paid off! Our liaisons gave us feedback, but were happy with the state of our project. We will take this experience and make our next group presentation even better. Next on the horizon for team Credential Core is accessing our virtual environment in the Gator Hatchery, and beginning work on our System Level Design Review.

This week we did a practice run of our PDR presentation along with several other groups: Cemantics, Verify, and Loyalty. Each of these teams peer reviewed our presentation and gave us useful feedback for our actual PDR presentation on the 17th. Our coaches were there as well to provide support and advice. We wore our RTX t-shirts for the presentation and took a picture with Dr. Resch, attached below.

This week we began working on our preliminary design architecture, pictured above. It outlines the technologies that we plan to use and how they fit together to form a cohesive application. We spent a lot of time researching the best solutions for our needs, and we believe that this design will give rise to a quality product. With that said, the design is still tentative, and it may be subject to change in the future.

Additionally, our sponsor, RTX, was present at this week’s career fair. Pictured below is an airplane that was gifted to Andy by the RTX representatives. Tragically, it seems to have some kind of defect that prevents it from flying. We are still investigating this problem, and we have high hopes that we will be able to fix it.

Finally, we also decided to switch the team roles around, since we want everyone to experience a variety of ways to contribute to the team. Our new roles are as so:
Elijah Johnson – Scribe (documentation and meeting notes)
Kaitlyn Kilner – Finance (budget management, cost tracking)
Daniel Melendez – Leader (coordination, sponsor communication)
Nicholas Tayag – Template (report formatting and consistency)
Joshua Rushlow – Blog (progress updates and communications)
Andrew Goodson – Travel (logistics and scheduling)
Colin Wishart – Research (literature review and technical exploration)

This week we began preparing for our upcoming Preliminary Design Review. We started writing a draft for the report and working out possible dates to visit their headquarters in Largo next month. Additionally, our liaisons will be shipping us our RTX T-shirts soon.

We have also gotten in contact with the Gator Hatchery, where we will be developing our project. The Gator Hatchery provides resources for students working on business projects, and they should be able to set us up with a machine to run Windows Server in a closed network. It should also be possible to access this machine remotely for development.