This week was less of a group week and more individual work. We did not meet during class, as there were interactive analysis presentations. We did not meet outside of class this week, either, as it wasn’t necessary for our prepared schedule. We are currently preparing for the 8 week midterm presentations for our project. However, since we were unable to find a class to take together, or at least a couple members, we have since modified the project. As I said last week, a few member will be getting baking lessons from friends who are familiar with baking, a few will be watching youtube tutorials. Meanwhile, I, and possibly one more person, will not be “preparing” for the competition but instead be doing it blind.

Doing nothing, though, does not lend itself well to being filmed, unlike the other two activities. Instead, to give the project a bit of a humorous edge, I will film, or likely be filmed by someone else, eating frosting on the couch, potentially taking a nap, anything to show how little effort I am putting forwards towards preparing for the project. The next step we will be pursuing as a team is our practice session. This will likely be in the next week and will involve practicing the layout of the competition in the setting we plan to be in.

     This week, we didn’t meet during class time because we got individual presentation during class. Although we didn’t meet this week, we had some discussion through GroupMe. Last week, we decided to have two people learn how to decorate cakes from their friends. However, Dylan was not able to learn from his friend for some reasons and he told us on GroupMe. We had a short discussion on this situation, and Emily might be able to get some tips from her mom and record it on this weekend. Also, I learned how to decorate cakes from my friend this week and I already record it. Therefore, the first problem happened in our team had been solved successfully.

     For next week, we are going to have a practice competition together. In that time, we will face some problems that might be happening in the final competition and we will solve these problems when they happen. Also, we are going to set up our camera to record the practice competition. The practice competition will help us a lot when we are going to do the final competition.  From now on, our project is progressing smoothly. Although we had some issues happened, we solved them satisfactorily. When someone in our group had some problems, other group members would be able to help.  

This week we were not able to meet in class so we had a couple of discussions over group me. There was a little bump in the road as I was not able to get together with my friend to show me baking tips. Her family was coming to town so she wanted to spend time with them which is completely understandable. Thankfully Fangrou was able to get footage of her friend giving baking tips. Emily is also hopeful that her mom will be able to give her some baking tips over the weekend and record that. Sometime next week we plan to get together as a group and have a practice competition. This means we are going to set up our cameras and go through all the troubleshooting we might have when we do our actual competition. For this practice, we are going to decorate a cake by doing it with crayons and paper. I think our project is going very smoothly so far. Whenever a problem comes up someone else is able to help no problem. We also plan to get a start on the layout of our website so once we have our footage it is super easy to put into place.

This week we continued to work out the details of the project we chose. We have officially decided to do the cake bake off for our project. This week we had to figure out the timeline of our project and, in this way, we figured out the semantics of our next few weeks. There were a couple different levels that we chose to approach for the assignment this week. The first necessary step of the assignment is to determine which of us is planning on taking a baking class and which baking class to take. Therein lay a difficult problem in preparation for the assignment. A lot of time this week was devoted to trying to find a cake decorating class, however, most of these seem to be only available in other cities. We tried finding courses in Michales, Joann’s and Hyvee’s, which all claimed to have the course on their sites, but did not have any available in Lincoln.

To compensate for this lack of available classes, we had to modify our project a bit. Instead of taking a “professional” class, we decided a member of the group would then take a class from a friend who is often baking and is knowledgeable about the content. For the rest of us, we were broken down into groups of those who would watch Youtube tutorials and those who would do nothing in preparation. From here, we decided to emulate the show “Nailed It” on Netflix and all attempt to create the same cake with our various levels of experience. As well, we planned out a set time to practice this experience so we know what the setting will be like ahead of time.

This week, we discussed about the schedule of this semester together as a group. During the class time, we were trying to find a cake decorating class in Lincoln, but we failed. We called bunch of stores which might provide a cake decorating class, but there were no class fit in this semester. We asked Mr. Matthew for help, and finally get an idea through discussion. we decided to let two of us take the cake decorating class from their friends who are good at baking cake, other two people study how to decorating cakes from YouTube videos and the last one will do nothing. We will use our phone to record videos to show our progress in next two weeks. In next two weeks, my job is to learn how to decorating cakes from my friend and record the video. After that, we are going to have a competition between all of us, and will find other people to critique. We will find a good place for the competition. We will set the video camera in a good angle so that camera could be able to shot all of us and record the whole competition. From now on, our group is going so far so well and we have a nice plan for the future.  

This week as a group we finished up our team schedule. We also ran into an issue with finding a cake decorating class in Lincoln. Everywhere we looked either did not host a class anymore or never had in their Lincoln location. To improvise we decide to have one person get lessons from a friend that had prior baking experience, two people learn from watching YouTube videos of cake decorating, and two people going in with no experience at all. This way we can see the difference that experience makes and if you can really learn it from YouTube. This week my job is to get my “class” scheduled with a friend and try to film that in the next two weeks. As a group before the start of week seven, we decided to have a practice run of our final baking competition day. We are going to find a room we can set all our equipment up to film and have our cake decorating competition with coloring. This way we can work out any kinks we might run into during our actual filming day. Other than getting our schedule figured out and who is going to be in charge of what we did not have much else to do this week.

In our class this week we presented our ideas for the project from the powerpoint we had made the previous week. The three ideas we ended up presenting were as follows: an escape room, a cake off, or “Inside the Ross.” While we discussed a couple of other ideas, these were the main three we enjoyed the most, or had the most potential. In the presentation, however, we determined that “Inside the Ross” wasn’t going to work as it wasn’t interactive enough. Unfortunately, my favorite idea was the Escape Room idea and that one didn’t make the final cut either. I thought it would have been really interesting to see behind the scenes of an escape room, although there was a possibility that would not have been allowed. While we moved beyond that idea, I did find the notion of building our own alternative escape room very interesting. I have worked as a camp counselor for a few years and have had to make way more scavenger hunts for children than I would care to admit, so I think that aspect of it would have been interesting.

The idea we are deciding to go with is the cake off. This sound like it could potentially be an exciting project, as well. The only setback being space available to make the cakes. I like both the ideas of taking a class but for only half the group, as well as adding in a notion of “Nailed It” and trying to recreate/ failing to recreate difficult cakes. Now we have to start looking for possible classes to take and cake styles to recreate.