Rutgers Online Learning Conference 2016-2021

My duties of a student worker was to make graphics and assist in any communications needed for the Rutgers Online Learning Conference. Worked for the Project Manager, handling all small tasks needed such as formatting agendas, pamphlets for the event, emailing speakers for presentation information, mild client contact for conference questions. I also worked on some graphic design used for pamphlet for conference. I cooperated with marketing and PR to promote and publicize event via email and social media.

As a student worker, my tasks were mainly to help the main PM with any and all tasks that I could to help make the conference run smoothly. On the day of the event, I also manned the front desk and welcomed all the attendees with their conference bags and a run-down of the event.

2017 – Game Level Builder in 2017 for GRID

This year I transferred as a student worker from the Center for Online & Hybrid Learning and Instructional Technologies (Cohlit) to Game Research Immersive Design(GRID)  

For 2017, I worked with my director and game developer lead to create a conference game to connect and aid in networking for all conference attendees. I mainly worked as support for the both of them, working on populating the questions and tags. I also worked on making sure the marketing and the copy for the description captured the essence of the game for the conference pamphlets. I also acted as a point of contact for the GRID team to make sure all of our deliverables were sent in to the conference planner on their timeline. This was the basis for my later transition to junior producer and then the PM/Producer.

I communicated with the main conference team alongside my GRID team members as well as made sure we were hitting our own deadlines for development. I worked with the game lead to bounce ideas on flow and was mentored in what makes a good playthrough easy to follow. Here is the prototype version of the flow for the app. https://marvelapp.com/prototype/53i9e86/screen/33785273

This was the first large conference game I worked on. The lead game developer, Kenny Chen, and I were in the early stages for another grant proposal about language learning technologies. One idea we threw around was using something similar to what snap chat does with their overlay filters into the conference app to get people to network together. The more we brainstormed, the more we liked what we came up with. The main idea would be to have multiple different overlays, similar to snap chat and the cardboard cutouts at carnivals, with different objectives and points to get people to work together and network. Different objectives would have their own cut out overlay or objective such as shaking someone’s hand.

The purpose of the game is to fill the mosaic centerpiece with pictures. The sense of collaborating with everyone attending the conference also cements the theme of this year’s conference “Collaborate”. The pictures would get moderated and approved by a person so then the image would create a mosaic that was updated in real time on monitors throughout the conference. The points for objective would then be distributed and then leaders would win cool prizes! The prizes would also need to be enticing. After negotiating with the higher level conference planning committee, I was able to secure the budget for the prizes and got them ordered.

Winners are chosen by the leaderboard scores. The top three people will receive a prize. Points are accumulated by taking pictures, commenting on pictures, voting and completing objectives. Different objectives yield different points. Aiming for higher scoring objectives might be a bit more difficult but worth it for the increase in points! 1st, 2nd and 3rd place are chosen straight from the leaderboard .There are more categories for prizes such as most creative, most liked.

Here is the design document meant to explain all the rules and phases to the greater conference team. 

I also made sure to keep all members of the team as well as our conference planner up to date on our progress as well as act as the voice of the team for any questions we had. As seen below via email.

 
Below is one of the prototypes for the overlay. Kenny made all of the art assets for the game.

The main flyer was distributed and sent to all attendees. 

The mosaic test ended up looking like this. I created the graphic for the overlay. 

All individual images would be “crowd sourced” the day of the conference. I worked with the conference PM to make sure we had students set up as a contingency plan just in case we started to fall short of filling the image. I spent a little time meeting with the student workers giving them everything they needed to explain how the game was played, help anyone with any questions and then also take pictures throughout the day to fill the final mosaic!

Well since there were so many pieces to this project, I kept track of some of the goals and to dos using ASANA as a Project Management tool. 

Below is an image from our board. 

Here is the leaderboards that I monitored on the day of the conference. It was my job to monitor the and moderate all the images coming through. I also trained the student workers to help assist me in case I got dragged away for something. 

In order to make sure we were getting feedback on the game, I also created a survey. I made sure to coordinate with the conference planners to ask any app related questions as well. 

Finally let’s talk about issues and lessons learned.

We had development issues with the team who was developing the app itself. We had our own design, design document and requirements that the app needed to adhere to. For some reason, we were cut from the communications with the main developers of the app. Not only did this frustrate the team and I, it also made us increasingly nervous the closer we got to the content deadlines. Since GRID was a bit small at the time, we were also juggling other projects. This meant that my other timelines were at stake. But thankfully, I had the support of my team and I ended up calling multiple meetings and circumnavigating the other PM so that we had a chance to check and iterate with the development team directly. We were able to unblock any and all communications, work on the back end for the moderation portion, ensure the front end interface of the app flowed properly and we tested all the overlays as soon as we could.

I ended up learning that being pushy with communications could be annoying but ultimately absolutely critical for the project to succeed. I always knew that maintaining a proper channel of communication was important but this was the first time I got to see the repercussions of bad management and bad communication flows. Since I got to be on the receiving end of bad communication, this helped me make sure I was keeping the team and stakeholders to a higher level understanding and communications for future projects. This ultimately helps me with risk management, setting expectations and allowing for bad and good news to get out faster.  This was a great learning experience for my team and I. I was lucky enough to deal with something as frustrating as this early in my career so hopefully I continue to carry these lessons forward.  

For 2019, because of the rough development issues we tried to mitigate any issues with our developers early on. We planned and tried to make things work with their team but unfortunately after coming to an understanding that our vision could not by fulfilled by their developers, we set out to make our own app. At this point in time, we released the Arbor Trail AR App. So we were confident in making our own AR app. We reached this point at the end of January of 2019, and began work in the beginning of February 2019. Only a mere month and some change before the conference on the 16th of March.

This game created for the conference explored the extended realities. Users could scan their pamphlets to experience AR, take a 360 photo in the photobooth and view it in VR, and exchange challenge cards with other conference goers for an IRL networking activity.

A lot of my duties for this project was trying to mitigate the issues the my team ran into last year. We had a lot of dropped communication from the developer team. We ended up over extending to make sure our parts were just like we envisioned. As seen below we were either cut from decisions or key members were not included on decisions or emails despite outlining how critical it was for people to be included.

The planning was fine but multiple decisions were made without us at the drawing tables since we were just the designers and not the developers. After a lot of back and forth between the two teams, GRID ended up creating their own app. With the 1 month of development time, we needed a fun activity that the conference attendees would enjoy, we needed to align with the theme of the conference which was “Xtended learning” for the 10^th anniversary of the conference and finally we needed to make sure the scope was feasible enough to avoid a crunch.

I also worked with our main designer and developer to create storyboards and concept maps. 

I also served as the point of contact for this project again so that our team was able to work on everything that needed to be created for this game. I intercepted and took care of all stakeholder management so that can work on their craft. 

Afterwards, we were able to create the game within Unity, I worked as QA and support for the team. 

The final pamphlets looked like this 

I also handled all the logistics of making sure I put in the request for the physical space needed for this project. I met with the conference planners multiple times to make sure GRID had a place next to the check in table for maximum engagement, ordered all the tables. chairs, internet cables and anything else you could think of for physical space requirements. Again, this was so that we were able to have everything ready, since I was not developing anything directly this time, I could focus on support and logistics. 

Here is the result of that hard work. You can see our booth, as well as the game photobooth, as well as the props that I made for the booth. You can also see attendees lining up for objectives! 
 

Not only that, but I made the Paper to Pixels presentation outline and proposal for the conference. We highlighted the importance of paper-prototyping to the iterative process of making games! 

We didn’t make things easy for ourselves but we were able to prove we could pull this off. With enough organizing and scoping down what we wanted to do, and understanding what was a reasonable ask for our developers, we were able to deliver this wonderful game for the conference. 

I unfortunately don’t have pictures of the finished  XR cards but I did find a graphic with the tags. 

Finally, below you see the example of how the game worked when you scanned the cards through your app and from our station! 

2020 Vision. Ru Online Conference 

This year’s theme was 2020 Vision!

We worked to come up with a concept that would use an outside contractors app to create another scanning conference type game. Attendees would scan people’s badges, workshops, keynote speakers, and around the conference to collect past, present and future educational technologies to unlock a history of education! 

To avoid issues with and outside development team again, we created an Adobe XD File walkthrough of the game. 

Since I had a few conferences under my belt, I was able to communicate the needs of the team and with strict timelines for check ins with the development team. Unfortunately, we ran into the same development issues. The development team had a few staffing issues on top of the poor communication of the PM working against us. 

I mainly worked as making sure we were getting our seat at the table, ensuring that our lead game designer had everything he needed to create the storyboards, the flow and overall look and feel of the game. I made sure that the main stakeholder, the conference planner and PM, knew what stages of development we were at and what information was handed over to the developers. 

I was also there to make sure the vision of the game was clear. I worked with the team for the brainstorming and storyboarding segments of the project. 

After work was steadily progressing for this project, I stepped down as I was working on a few workshops for the department. I was also in charge for another project, The Voorhees Mall XR Tour.  My Assistant Director for our department took over the day to day for this project. I occasionally stepped in when I saw more blockages happening but the team had this handled. Progress on the app was progressing slowly. 

We were set to deliver the game portion of the conference app but the development team was not able to deliver a finished conference app. Because of our portion relying on their platform, this game was unfornutely cancelled. This was in the beginning of March. A week into March, we got news about the health issues arising because of Covid. So the conference was ultimately cancelled.