Getting started. Hello Capstone!
Written and edited by: Alana Mittleman, Leanne Liu, Marlon Mejia, Martina Tan, Swetha Kannan
We are now two weeks into a months-long process in which the five of us have been tasked to solve a design problem for Pittsburgh-based FAME (Fund for Advancement of Minorities Through Education). This is our largest project as part of Carnegie Mellon University’s MHCI program called the ‘capstone’.
We are meeting our sponsor, FAME, this Friday. In the meantime, we’ve kept ourselves busy with meeting each other, planning team logistics, and, most importantly, figuring out the agenda for our meeting with FAME.
Meet the team
We are a team of five and although not all of us have worked together in the past, we were all friends before the start of the capstone which made getting acquainted much easier!
In addition to all of us, we are also honored to be advised by additional Carnegie Mellon University Faculty:
Raelin Muscara who teaches courses in the HCII Capstone, and was a former sponsor of MHCI Capstone while at American Eagle. She is an excellent resource for us, as well as for project guidance, and has multiple years of experience advising capstone projects since joining CMU.
Rachel Dzombak who received her Ph.D. from Cal Berkeley, and works at the intersection of engineering and social impact as an educator, strategist, and researcher. We’re excited to have her mentor us for her first time with the Capstone, as she is passionate about the future of education.
Team logistics
A hard part of starting this semester was that we all were remote as part of a university health mandate to combat the spread of the coronavirus and it variants. Still, our team did as much as we good to get acquainted and start our collaboration positively.
One of our memebers, Matina Tan, lead us all through a small team workshop which we all completed through Zoom using a Miro board. It was a fun exercise that had us talking about the best ways we work, what we’d like to learn, and what we can offer the team.
Ultimately, this activity helped us come to a consensus about our team charter and helped us develop and assign roles for the first few weeks of this project. Of course, we expect these roles to evolve as we learn more from our sponsors.
Planning an Agenda
The majority of our time these past two weeks has been dedicated to creating an agenda for our Kick-off meeting with FAME.
To do this, we’ve been doing research into FAME to figure out as much as we could before meeting them. Fortunately FAME sent over material that we could peruse to find out more. Through this, we used Miro once again to create a Stakeholder map of our current understanding of who exactly is involved with FAME, what they do, and how they affect the Pittsburgh comunity.
This activity helped us put into perspective what exactly we have learned about FAME so far. We’re looking forward to adjusting this understanding through our first meeting this Friday.
Agenda-wise, we have similarly used Figma(Are you getting that we’re all visual planners?) to brainstorm what activities help us learn the most of what we need to from FAME.
Next steps: meeting FAME!
Overall, we are eager to have our first meeting with FAME so we can learn more and hopefully get started on the design process of our Capstone project.
We all are excited to work with a non-profit in the Pittsburgh area since the mission of FAME — to help to educate, empower and embolden African American youth and educators — was one that spoke to the personal interest of our team members. We are honored to contribute to such a cause as theirs.
