OUR LEARNING JOURNEY
The ADventurous
Through the process of studying at the Advertising and Public Relations field of the Communication, Media and Civilization Department in Panteion University, we were introduced to the AD & PR Lab, an innovative lab compared to the Greek educational system standards, which offers lots of practice to the students, while it gives them the opportunity of meeting marketing experts. Specifically, we will be describing our journey in the Digital Creativity, Apps, Games and Coding course. The first semester of this academic year was filled with many learning experiences and challenges that made us comprehend our topics, projects and studying material better. Overall, it was a fundamental introduction to how this field operates.
These past months we were taught about a lot of crucial learnings and theoretical aspects of the marketing and social media field and how these two are connected, and we turned this theory into practice. In this course we were taught about digital creativity, apps, games and coding. The learning process included presentations from all our professors, who were Stavros Kaperonis and Betty Tsakarestou, with the help of Athanasios Kontaxis. These courses combined key learnings about marketing strategies, social media innovation and digital apps and websites, digital design, infographics, user experience maps and video editing and filming.
We were given the chance to meet in person and see the work of several important people in the marketing business. Specifically, we had the opportunity to attend the presentations of Panagiotis Zaharias, Antonis Birbas and Magy Kontou.
The person who left the best impression on us is Magy Kontou, who was responsible of teaching us how to design a mobile app. She impressed us with how close she was to us during the course and how she helped us by answering all of our questions during the process of the app designing. Mr. Kontaxis reminded a group of us of how to work on wordpress, a website-creating form and held special courses for the students who hadn’t had experience on working on wordpress before. We learned how to add tags, catergories, stylize our articles and gained further knowledge, such as adding map features on the website.
As we mentioned above, the lab consisted of practice instead of just theory. Part of this practice was the completion of various projects. We were shown how to work in an environment which is similar to an advertising company and how to function well under pressing circumstances, such as tight schedules and deadlines. Therefore, our experience resembled working in a real advertising business.
Another way in which our projects brought us closer to the real-time experience of working at an advertising company was that some of the basic requirements to complete our projects were collaborating as teams, brainstorming and listening to everyone’s ideas, as well as combine them in order to create a solid and innovative big idea. We brought our creative side and incorporated our everyday thoughts, ideas and real-life learnings into our works. This seriously affected the quality of our project results. One of the biggest challenges we had to face was creating our own innovation project from scratch, given the suitable instructions and guidelines from our professors which helped us complete this challenging task.
One more important learning we had experts to analyze to us was User Experience Maps (UX) and how the User Experience is determined, mainly when it comes to apps and websites. Through different examples, we saw how the app should operate based on the users’ standards. We were challenged to check how well applications and websites of our choice function based on the rules set for the User Experience. This way, we were brought closer to how a business works on creating the best User Experience possible. Through ours and our colleagues’ projects we saw how applications we use on a daily basis can be difficult for the users.
In conclusion, it was a highly informative great first step towards our experience as advertising and marketing experts. We got a glimpse of the industry, we fell in love with the magical process of creating content and campaigns and we still have a lot more to learn. During our time in the AD & PR Lab up until today, with much practice, we became experts of video creating, PowerPoint presentations, info-graphics, poster creating and operating social media accounts for our projects, campaigns and corporations.
Professors: Betty Tsakarestou Dr. Stavros Kaperonis
Team: Georgia Bethani Anastasia Goutou Bianca Konstantinidou Dora Kopsafti Maria Megalokonomou Theodora Trapezonta Αγγελίνα Κοκοβίλη
