Our experience with ‘Digital Creativity: Apps, Games, Coding’ Lab
Part of the Panteion University ‘Ad & PR Lab’
We are inLOVators, a creative team formed for the needs of the Ad & PR Lab in the Department of Communication, Media & Culture at the Panteion University. Our team consists of 8 members, all sharing the passion for the marketing and advertisement world.
THE AD & PR LAB
The Ad & PR Lab consists of two interconnected modules. The first one, Applied Marketing — Digital & Mobile Marketing, revolves around the concept of business set-up, in terms of conceiving and presenting the idea for an innovative brand. The objective of the second module, Digital Creativity: Apps, games, coding, is to provide us with the essential tools and technical skills we need as aspiring digital marketers of the modern times. In this post we will discuss the learning journey and our overall experience of the latter.
LECTURES, PROJECTS & PRESENTATIONS
As mentioned above, the second module of the Ad & PR Lab targets exclusively on familiarizing us (the students) with the latest technologies, its potential and providing us with the essential skills to handle them.
In order to help us acquire a plethora of digital skills, our professors turned to the specialists of each field. As a result, the floor was given to a number of guest-lecturers, each of who introduced us to their field of specialty and provided us with in-depth tutorials on carrying out a diversity of tasks, using exclusively free tools. At the end of each lecture, we were assigned a team project, relevant to the field discussed, to complete and present by a given deadline (short or long-term).
We believe that the in-class presentations played a crucial role in our progress. The comments and feedback we received both from the guest-lecturers and the fellow students helped us not only correct our “mistakes” but most importantly to understand thoroughly the technology we were working with.
Let’s see some highlights of the skills we developed:
WEBSITE CREATION
Our very first lecture was given by Dr. Athanasios Kontaxis, IT professor in our department, who covered the topic of creating a website/blog, using the free Wordpress content-management system (CMS). After guiding as step-to-step into the platform by explaining its endless possibilities, we were considered to be fully equipped, hence more than ready to explore the platform ourselves. Therefore, we were asked to create 2 websites: a self-presentation blog and a corporate website, for the innovative brand we proposed in the other module of the lab.
VIDEO PRODUCTION & EDITING
If a picture is worth 1000 words, a video is worth 1.800.000 words.
Dr. Stavros Kaperonis, also a professor in our department, and associate of the Ad & PR Lab, took on the –admittedly hard- task of teaching us how to prepare for, produce and edit videos, using Kinemaster. Learning how to use a freeware video-editing application showed us that content production is possible anywhere: all it takes is a good idea or two, and some basic skills on the software. At the end of that lecture, we were asked to create a 30-seconds video under the title “What does AD & PR Lab mean to you?”
IMAGE EDITING & INFOGRAPHICS
In the following week, Dr. Kaperonis introduced us to Piktochart, yet another free and easy-to-use tool for creating image-content and infographic presentations. The point here was to learn how to produce quality content for marketing purposes (whether that was artworks for social media, or corporate proposals addressed to clients) using and tailoring to our needs pre-existing templates. After the lecture, we were given a double assignment: to choose an existing product and create a Client Proposal that solves a problem the company faces, and to create two posts for two different social media platforms (Facebook & Instagram), taking into consideration the technical requirements and specs of each. The social media posts would promote a) the launch of a product, and b) the reasons one should choose our product, using infopgraphics. We chose to work with L’Oreal’s Seed Phytonutrients series.
UX — HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Our next guests were the co-creators of The UXProdigy company, Dr. Panagiotis Zaharias and Mr Antonis Birmpas, who guided us into the world of User Experience, in regard to mobile applications. After examining what makes an application easy to use and why is that, they showed us the commonly used methodology to evaluate if an app is actually user-friendly. The process is called Heuristic Evaluation and it relies on the application of 10 Heuristic Rules. Our assignment this time was to pick an existing application and perform Heuristic Evaluation on 3 user-journeys and present it in class in the following session. We chose to evaluate the Vodafone CU Application.
PROTOTYPING A MOBILE APPLICATION
Once we’ve learnt how to evaluate an application, it was about time we learnt how to create one ourselves! Our final guest-lecturer was Ms Magy Kontou, co-founder of the Simple Apps company. Her session consisted of two parts: one covering the process of creating a mobile application from scratch, in the context of an app-developing company, and one showcasing proto.io as a tool for creating application prototypes. Using the knowledge acquired both by this and the UX lecture, we were asked to create a prototype application for the innovative brand we created in the first module of the Ad & PR Lab.
DESIGN THINKING
The final lecture was given by our professor and head of the Ad & PR Lab, Dr. Betty Tsakarestou, who introduced us to the model of Design Thinking. Using the resources and material provided by openIDEO, we were assigned to prototype our ideal 21c Ad & PR Lab. The suggested methodology challenged us to spot problems of the Lab, prioritize them and finally choose one to give solution to. The problem we worked with, and prototyped a solution for was the miscommunication often-present in between the lab sessions.
The Verdict
All told, our experience from this module is absolutely positive. As challenging and demanding as it was, we are all happy to have been a part of it. The topics covered in the course have helped us step out of our comfort zones by getting involved with technologies and software we were not familiar with. We deeply believe that these are the tools that will allow our creativity and imagination take actual form and shape.
Professors: Betty Tsakarestou, Dr. Stavros Kaperonis
Team Members: Panagiotis Theofanopoulos, Katerinakrk, Konstantina Pantziou, Ιωάννα Ταμβάκη, elena kara, Anargyros Koukouvinos, Aliki Dereki, Sofia Tsili
