This year's Fellowship program, our unique approach to paid learning, is in full swing. The 3 month curriculum gives the 25 fellows a chance to flex their collaborative design and technical thinking skills by working through a self-directed project to design and develop their own digital product.  

Here's a closer look at what our fellows have been up to in the past two weeks.

Week 1: Discovery

Fellows were split into teams and welcomed to the Myplanet family. Each team created their own team identity, values, and system to interact and engage with one another. They also started brainstorming about user problems they wanted to tackle. We encouraged Fellows to start thinking about user-centered design.

Week 2: User Research

Fellows learned how to conduct thorough user research. Led by our resident user research specialist Nate Archer, teams explored ways in which they can learn about potential users that might experience the problem identified in last week's sessions. Fellows began crafting user personas to identify who their potential users are, and what their habits might be. Teams also started to develop research plans to identify goals & structure project logistics. 

We're incredibly excited to see the accomplishments of our Fellows this term.. keep an eye on the blog and revel in their progress with us! 

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In the meantime, we’d like to introduce to you three of our five Fellowship teams – in their own words. We'll hear from the remaining two teams next week! 

Team 1: Tectonic Play

Comprised of a business whiz, coding queen, and two design gurus, we are Tectonic Play (see what we did there?). We aim to analyze and develop tools to enhance the ways in which real people (sorry E.T.!) merge technology and human interaction. We believe that business is like a chocolate soufflé - many different ingredients, sweat, and love eventually come together to make something delightful and delicious (when done right).

We like people. You should meet us:

Cory Skimming (Mlle.Biz) – Product Owner
Studies: Management Information Systems at McGill University
Claim to Fame: Professional snacker. It’s a big responsibility, I swear.

Sangah Han (The Code Queen)
Studies: Computer Science at University of Toronto
Claim to Fame: Pretty much the Michael Jackson meets Michael Flatley meets Britney Spears (circa 1999) of Just Dance

Sally Chan (Graphic Chan)
Studies: Industrial and Graphic Design at OCAD
Claim to Fame: Made the inaugural TEDx conference at OCAD happen. No biggie.

Jacques Ramphal (The Testosterone) – Scrum Master
Studies: Graphic Design at OCAD
Claim to Fame: Your resident typophile – WILL KERN FOR FOOD.

We care about things. Especially these things:
Designing ENGAGING and meaningful products.  
Developing ideas for SUSTAINABLE business. 
Making INTEGRITY in products, interactions, and execution a priority.  
Being DYNAMIC. Always.

Our mission: To better engage audiences at conferences and live talks. Interested? (You should be). Stay in tune for next week’s update…

Team 2: GoodFellas

Our team name was inspired by our group's play on being nice and being part of the fellowship program. Pretty cool isn’t it? We thought so too. What started out as just a team name has transpired into our problem statement, a classy logo and even our team values.

We like to think of ourselves as the little crack commando unit within the fellowship program. The team consists of 4 commandos: Sharath is the Interaction and Scrum commando, Vibhu is our head product commando and part time dev commando, Will is our lead DevOps commando and Jason is our lead design+ ninja commando. Our team values in short are: “We are never gonna give you up or let you down “inspired by the famous Rick Astlley.  To expand on that a bit, we’ll never let our users down, we will strive to do our best work possible, and respect each other’s time, boundaries and skillsets to work towards team harmony. Harmony and happiness is very important to us. We’re gonna work really hard and have equal amounts of fun in all the things we tackle. Watch out, we are the GoodFellas and we are just getting started.

Team 3: <myTitan>

Titan:  Saturn's largest moon - is the only moon in the solar system with clouds and a dense, planet-like atmosphere.

myPlanet Digital: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship <myTitan>. Its 12-week mission: to explore strange new code, to seek out new ideas and new experiences, to boldly go where no Fellow has gone before.

The first two weeks of myPlanet Fellowship have passed and team <myTitan> is blasting through the galaxy full steam ahead and not turning back! Consisting of an eclectic mix of cyborg developers and jedi designers from U of T, George Brown, and Sheridan, <myTitan> is looking to unify their skills under the mentorship of myPlanet to explore the uncharted territories of galaxy Drupal.  

<myTitan> is currently in the lab developing their new mobile app, which aims to give mortal earthlings a virtual assistant to help reduce stress during their daily grind.

Armed with a research plan, interview guides, and a story map, <myTitan> hope to defy the laws of gravity next week in the Design Studio. Fueled on Tim Hortons coffee and Domino’s pizza, API Andrew, <div> David, Digital Danielle, FTP Fiona and Pain Point Patrick are up for the challenge, and will do whatever it takes for <myTitan> to succeed.