The Syllabus | The Fine Print | The Notes
Welcome to the Prototyping Lab, updated for the Spring 2019 term.
Product-making is exceptionally important to journalism, especially today. This class is an excellent opportunity to get experience building and testing product experiments.
We're going to learn how to play, experiment, learn, and tinker as we toy with new ways to experience and consume information. This is a hands-on class, and participation is key. Let's have some fun and make great things -- or at least learn a lot trying.
The class description, logistics, rules, and grading details are in a document I call "the fine print."
Also known as the syllabus, here's the rundown of what we'll cover in our weeks together.
- Every time Donald Trump tweets, put it in a spreadsheet
- Every time it's at or below 32 degrees send a tweet
- Whenever someone posts on their blog, get an email
- Whenever papers are filed in a court case, get an email
- Make Alexa tweet for you
- When something happens in the digital world, make something happen in the physical world
All this and more is possible without any coding at all. We'll make theses mini-products and learn about mashing up existing services into new prototypes that (maybe) never existed before.
Weather info, crypto prices, earthquake alerts -- it's all available, and ready to be shaped into a new product nobody's made before you did. We'll learn how to find and use that data.
From web site analytics to stock prices, making dashboards to track your numbers may be the most important product you build, even if just for yourself. We'll use APIs and spreadsheets to make 'em fast.
When your project needs to blend existing information, or relies on custom data only you have, you may need to get into some code. We'll use Glitch to play with some examples (no coding experience necessary.)
Voice interfaces are popping up everywhere, and it's possible they will be key to information acquisition in the months and years to come. We'll use Glitch to build an Alexa Skill.
Building a whole Alexa skill just to test it out on your friends or possible customers is possible -- but not always necessary. We'll learn how to prototype voice conversations quickly using an audio playboard.
Texting or chatting with bots is one way to communicate with your audience. We'll learn the dos and don'ts of automated conversations -- and then we'll do one.
Automatically processing what someone is saying -- either in a chat, to a voice assistant, or in an email -- is increasingly possible thanks to machine learning. We'll play with one of these natural language processing tools (Dialogflow) to get a handle on how to make it work for you.
Can you teach a computer to recognize the Mandarin duck in Central Park. Yup. Is that useful? Could be! We'll learn how, as we see how image processing and machine learning can work together on your project.
A good email offering may be the most important product for your project. We'll look at what makes some emails great and also how to use tools to send useful emails programmatically.
Tiny computers can sense the environment or respond to your commands. They can even keep track of things when you're far away. Prototyping these kinds of products is surprisingly cheap and easy. We'll do it in class.
Let's talk about security. We'll get into how you can start practicing better personal security and about how to act responsibly and ethically with the data you get from others.
When it's time for your prototype to become production-worthy, you'll need scale, security, and reliability. And chances are, that means putting it in a "cloud" service like Amazon's AWS -- or the similar offerings from Google, Microsoft, and others. We'll take a tour through AWS so you can better coordinate with your engineers when it's time to go big.
Most weeks we will devote a part of class to talk about your ideas and progress on a prototyping project, and your preparation for your final presentation.