The Magical Journey of “Digital Creativity: Apps, games and coding”
During the third year of our university studies we had the honor to have Dr. Betty Tsakarestou and Dr. Stavros Kaperonis as our professors in the “Digital creativity: Apps, games and coding” class. In this class we had the opportunity to expand our knowledge and skills in the field of digital marketing as we got a first-hand experience from apps and digital templates that most successful businesses use. For more than four months as team members of the team “Fellowsheep” we were professionally cooperating in order to achieve our goals and deliver our tasks that were submitted by our professors. What motivated us during this time was the phrase << The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful. >> — Plato. A phrase that worked as a reminder that what we do is some kind of art and our hard efforts will pay off one way or another!
The first task that we were assigned was to create a video answering one simple question: “what is Ad & Pr Lab to you?”. At first, we thought that it was simple, and maybe it was, but we decided to challenge ourselves by creating a video that is controversial and best expresses every single one of us. And that’s when the “casting couch” idea was brought to the table. “Casting couch” is a scenario for some pornographic videos where the adult film actor/actress is sitting in a couch answering to some question just like a cast for a movie…well at least that is the beginning of the video. So, we decided to keep the beginning of these videos and to answer with one word to the assigned question. We filmed the video in Panagiotis house, and it was the first, out of many to come, task that we successfully completed with having a lot of fun in the process.
As the journey continued, we had the honor to host two amazing experts on UX (unique experience): Dr Panagiotis Zaharias (Founder of theUXProdigy) and Mr. Antonis Birmpas (UX researcher and art director). UX is, as they explained, the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and service. Our task was to choose a site on the internet and check if it is practical, if we encounter any problems and at the end to make a heuristic evaluation about it. We decided to choose the website of our faculty! We encountered many problems that would frustrate the user and we made sure to make them known on our evaluation.
At the middle of the semester, we had already got a little bit tired in seeing each other every other day in order to work on our projects, but deep in our minds we knew that we should keep up the good work. The next task that we were assigned had to do with Piktochart and infographics. Firstly, we had to make a research about an organization or a product and then by using Piktochart we had to show the results in the form of infographics. As an alternative team with fresh ideas we chose a shop that would chime with our philosophy. This shop was an online sex-shop by the name “Venus’’ where the costumer can find literally everything about sex. We decided to run a campaign that would advertise the values of the shop and its products! We created a proposal report that included a Facebook post about the reasons why someone should choose Venus and we also launched a Facebook poster. Moreover, we created an Instagram post, we use the same theme as the Facebook post and we also created a poster for Instagram. Our goal was to promote a shop that is controversial because even in 2020 there is a debate as far as sex shops are concerned. When the first chance was given to us,we wanted to dedicate one of our projects to sex because first as persons and then as a team, we wanted to educate people about its importance and the unfair prejudice on the matter.
Last but not least, we learned how to design an app simulation step-by-step using Proto.io. In the past, we never had the chance to work in any project from our mobiles devices and when we saw that from this platform, we can do professional work, we felt very pleased. After all the essential steps such as gathering information and brainstorming, we finished our task entirely. During our last meeting, we were asked to give our feedback about the laboratory and provide some solutions and ideas in order to enhance its quality for the new students.
To sum up, the semester was way better than we expected. The fact that we work cooperatively as a team made us understand deeply our colleague’s needs, interests and necessities, put aside our ego and try continuously to find the best possible solutions. Certainly, there were times where our team would agree and disagree on different matters, but we would always find a way to make things work. Considering, the productive, professional and the interesting character of the semester that we already experienced, we expect from the upcoming one to have at least some of the aforementioned assets. So, to be continued…
Professors: Betty Tsakarestou Betty Tsakarestou, Dr. Stavros Kaperonis
Team members: Ηλίας Αλεξανδρής, dimitris boutsikow, Loukia Tsiota, Pavlos Stratikopoulos, Νίκος Παπασυριόπουλος, Panagiotis Yiagkou
