A Playday Post Mortem (part 1)

Hmmm... that title looks alarming like some sort of murder mystery. But here I mean post mortem in the "project review" sense. It seemed like a good time to draw a line under Together Through Play, and since Playday was pure Grand finale,  I thought it would be a good time to review what went right, what went wrong,  and what I've learned for the future. As ever, let's start with the "What was good", before "What could have been better" (you can tell I've done a teaching certificate,  eh? ). Time is short today,  so I'll do what was good today,  and the improvements in my next post.

What was Good

1) That we did it at all.  That's my number one.  It was great to actually show our work of and talk to the public about it. It was great to see the reactions we got,  even the unexpected problems ( as we shall see next post!). I always enjoy showing off what we're doing.  Partly because I'm a show-off, but also because I like to know whether what I'm doing actually means something.

2) Taking a trial run that morning. I'd made some late improvements to the Button Bash code on my laptop. Upon copying it back to the Windows tablet we were using, it wouldn't run at all. I found this out when I did one last check on the morning before setting off. The problem was the number of the COM port for the arduino in the code. Trivial,  easily corrected,  but a headache,  and it would have beem a load more hassle trying to fix during set up. I've demo'd enough kiss to know that you should always test on the morning!

3) Charging the Tablet beforehand.  There was a delay in getting power to us.  In the end it got sorted out in good time before starting,  but knowing I had two hours' charge on the tablet meant there was no stress at all. We had a buffer, even if we didn't need it.

4) Bright posters, bunting and horsey seats. These were courtesy of Sinead Dumigan, one of my Product Design students who supplied the graphics for the game. When you're working on a game,  it's easy to focus on what's on the screen.  You forget that from even four feet away, or just looks like a tablet. Add the posters, bunting and horse seats, and you suddenly have something that looks interesting from a distance and pulls people in.

These were the good.  But what could we have done better?  Tune in next time!