Trying on Scrum with TOTT
Four TOTT skilled trade examples
Apprenticeship Manitoba (AM), a long-time client of Red River College’s Teaching and Learning Technologies Centre (TLTC), dreamed mid-2014 of a game that could engage middle-school kids and introduce them to the world of the skilled trades. The vision was an immersive 3-D virtual world where custom avatars used all kinds of tools and materials to build cool stuff. But with a small budget and only a few months to deliver, it was a tall order.
Fortunately for Apprenticeship (and for all involved in the eventual project), RRC’s eTV Learning Technologies department was producing some pretty stunning, interactive 360-degree spherical photo panorama tours. So what Michael Farris, then Director of the TLTC, recommended to AM instead of Virtual Reality (VR) was a decidedly more modest Augmented Reality (AR) solution. And though less ambitious, AR had the potential to actually deliver a more engaging learning environment via 360-degree panoramas of familiar locations embedded with “hotspots” that would launch interesting trade-related facts, games, and challenges. Apprenticeship liked the idea, and so was born Trying on the Trades (TOTT).
As demonstrated by eTV, building interactive 360-degree panos was already possible, though not easy. And custom interactions such as the word games and simulations envisioned for the Apprenticeship project did not exist. So the TLTC contracted the building of a prototype to Manitoba software development company, Bold Innovation Group (now Bold Commerce). What was needed was an editor to embed interactive hotspots onto 360-panos, and a supporting game engine that could award and track points as users explored the environment. The result was a WordPress front end to a content management system that served up high quality gamified eTV spherical panoramas of Winnipeg landmarks such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Manitoba Legislature.
eTV panorama of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights that was gamified by TOTT
Following this successful proof of concept, Michael Farris transferred TOTT development to a new company, Bit Space Development (BSD). As it turns out, BSD’s founder and recent BIT Program grad, Dan Blair, had been asked by the BIT Program’s Co-Op coordinator, Dan Greenberg, if he would be willing to take on six Brazilian students for a work-experience semester. Michael Farris offered to attach TLTC Project Specialist and ScrumMaster Guy Dugas to the project. And the RRC Chair responsible for the BIT Program, Haider Al-Saidi, suggested that both Guy Dugas and Dan Blair co-locate with the students in the Massey Building’s BIT Project space. The stars could not have been in better alignment.
The 2015 Brazilian BIT team: Reuel Ramos Ribeiro, Anderson Pires Pereira, Julia Passamani, Diego Santos, Andre Felipe Costa Silva, Douglas Modena.
In fact, May 5th, 2015, marked the official start of not one, but two BIT Projects. The first would complete TOTT WordPress development for Apprenticeship, including a suite of embed-able JavaScript word games. The second, building upon what was learned in TOTT, would develop a completely new Content Management System (CMS), PanoPlā, for Bit Space Development. And the six Brazilians would be split across the two under the supervision of Dan Blair and Guy Dugas.
Illustration of Scrum iterations, called “Sprints”
Unlike previous semesters, daily student access to both a resident development mentor and a dedicated ScrumMaster facilitated the implementation of an Agile software development framework called Scrum. Though still relatively new in the project management field, Scrum is the leading agile development methodology, used by Fortune 500 companies around the world. Consequently, Haider Al-Saidi was keen to see the iterative, rapid development framework applied to both BIT Projects.
Scrum did not disappoint. By the end of the four-month semester in late August, client (Product Owner in Scrum parlance) expectations had been far exceeded for both projects. At the time of writing, both the TOTT WordPress system and PanoPlā are ready for Beta testing. And PanoPlā has moved into a second semester of development with a new batch of BIT students who are getting the product ready for a full launch by the end of October.
TOTT, clearly, has proven to be the start of something much bigger.