I am going to have my systems analysis and design students use bubble as their prototyping tool for semester long design projects. Rather than give teams a pre-selected project, our tradition has been to let teams pick an actual project with a real client. We manage expectations so that client does not expect a working system but more of a vision for what it could be. Projects tend to be inward facing and clients are generally on campus. Examples might include scheduling or sign ups for a student club or department.
Students are in teams of 3 to 5. These students have had some programming experience and a course in databases but they are generally not coders. (The course is taught in the information systems department, not computer science).
Still getting up to speed on bubble but wanted to share my current take and ask for any advice.
Here are my rough ideas:
Students use free accounts (with option to move to paid if a team wants to go further with their project).
Students do the basic intro material in Academy to get started. I will supplement with some course-specific guidance. Grateful for any pointers to other must-use material.
One person on each team creates a public project that the others can join in editing.
Students periodically make a copy of the project as a kind of rough backup. (I know there is built-in versioning but going with the simplest backup I can imagine for starters.)
Grateful for any advice on things to put on the list or things to watch out for.
One person on each team creates a public project that the others can join in editing.
Unless you have some special educational discount plans, the free hobby plan doesn’t allow that.
We tend to just use common username/passwords and share a login.
Teams of 3-5
One thing we struggle with professionally even is trying to add more developers in a project. I’m afraid that you’ll find them stepping on each others toes a lot. If 1 person spends 3 hours on an app, the context of the application moves. And the others will be trying to reverse engineer things and struggle to follow. Best case would probably be pair programming so that two people can screenshare and build together.
Unless it is too hard to manage, I’d recommend a max team of two. Even 1 per team btw. Although you may struggle to find clients depending on class size.
must use material.
I make new hires (no bubble experience) go through two things in first week.
Just copy the whole application. It’s pretty easy.
Things to watch out for.
The way i see it, there are two ways to build using bubble. Just get started.
Or engineer the application a bit. I tend to favour the structured engineering approach. Make a flow chart of the user doing various things. Think of the database first. Then page structure, navigation, user flow. Then various workflows. I’m sure others have their approaches.
Question: Any particular reason for not adding a bit of entrepreneurship to the mix? Make the students soft launch/test a business idea itself? That may make them more driven compared to client work.
I have a passion for academia. Feel free to send a direct message and I’ll share a Calendly link. Happy to have a conversation and help you out
Hi @Welleeni … I agree and found @ZubairLK 's advice super useful! I actually adopted the Twitter Clone blog post as the basis for an assignment in which I broke building the clone into 3 sprints and identified a series of user stories and then had students walk through building out one at a time. It seems to be really helpful and we are now starting to build out our prototypes in earnest.
Just a quick note to say how much I appreciate your suggestions. The semester has been hectic but I am finding Bubble a good fit so far. Look forward to following up when I come up for air!
we were recently discussing implementing a similar project in bubble at a university where we mentor CS and design students in product development. awesome idea and would love to hear how this works out for you @gwyner !
