I enjoyed the Final Project Cookbookettes presentations by Team 4 and Team 5 yesterday. It's always a treat when somebody other than the instructor stands up in front of the class and talks (nothing against you, Dr. Tiff, I like you a lot too). In any case, here is short review about what I felt about the presentations/websites. Please don't take any of this personally, I like all of you (even those who criticize me) this is just my opinion. I don't expect my group website to be better than anyone else, but we'll see today anyhow.
Team 5: Korean For GT Foodies
First off, it was brave of you to choose Korean cuisine as the subject. It's hard enough to do a project on a familiar subject, let alone a website on foreign cuisine. How you guys managed to learn Korean cooking skills, techniques, recipes and a palate in less than two months is beyond me. Kudos. I know my team members will cringe when I say this: we chose an easy subject when we chose chocolate desserts.
Thumbs Up:
I liked the soft brown and yellow theme of the website (gives it distinctly Asian overtones), the overall structure and the recipe pages design. It was great how you varied the recipe selection by including some simple and incredibly complicated ones, desserts, entrees, and appetizers. You covered a lot of ground in 5 recipes, and gave us all a Korean history lesson to boot! Those spirit-style personas were a nice touch too.
Thumbs Down:
You could have put up more original content on the website. I would have enjoyed this "cookbookette unveiling" more had the presentation been a little more fluid and professional.
Team 4: College Microwave Cookbookette
Another great unique idea: What do college students lack? Mom, money and time. What do they have? Microwaves and fridges. Why not make a college microwave cookbookette targeting this group? Yet, I have never seen, heard or read about such a thing in the market. I mean, if you connect the dots... it seems all very simple. Maybe the rest of us out there are just idiots.
Thumbs Up:
You guys really got into the whole college thing. What better way to select recipes than to ask college students themselves through a survey? Brilliant. Lots of original content, pictures, videos (too bad they didn't work on the site) and an enthusiastic team manager. I liked the fact that most of you speaking were confident, loud and comfortable with what they were talking about. It's clear you put in loads of work into this.
Thumbs Down:
I'm not a huge fan of the website design and structure. The colors, themes and fonts were sort of off-putting.
Well, I've tried to keep the criticisms short and to the point. Please forgive me if I overlooked any aspects of your team's websites, content, presentation, etc. I wasn't taking notes - all this is from memory. Now this also means that I've set my group up for a higher standard of evaluation. I should not be surprised then, to find a laundry list of complaints about my group's cookbookettes later. FML.
Yet again this is Hasan, helping you sort Internet trash from Internet treasure. (Though there is no trash here to speak of - you were all great.)
Thanks for the input Hasan!
ReplyDeleteInitially, I believed cooking a foreign cuisine would be tough but after a few of these entrees (namely the dessert, the cold noodles, and soup), it was easier than I thought (at least for me). Cooking began to be more of an assembly.
As for the thumb down, I concur about the originality but I think given the difficulty in the recipes (when we initially started) we really didn't want to deviate too much from a traditional cookbook I guess. (Other teammates have better responses on this matter).
For the chocobombers, I really liked the website's layout but for the presentation, it felt like the recipes were not the main focus, which I think it should have been. You definitely had some extent of originality (mentioning the different types of chocolates in addition to the history). It just felt like more focus on the extra stuff and not the recipes to be exact.
Thanks for your input as well! I really appreciate it... I felt the same way about our presentation initially, that you know, the focus was not on the recipes... but we decided we had already covered a lot about the recipes in our progress report presentation. So, we thought we should focus on what we've added instead of repeating stuff. It's a collective decision, I guess.
ReplyDeleteStrongly agree that the whole college theme of the Microwave group. The intended audience is really clear so that the whole purpose of the cookbook is very clear too.
ReplyDeleteAlso,"Another great unique idea: What do college students lack? Mom, money and time. What do they have? Microwaves and fridges." Good point!!! lol!! YEA WE LACK MOMS!!! haha, it is funny and true...
Anyways, I really like the diea of it.
For the Korean food group，i just really want to say that ur presentation makes me want to go back to China and eat in the Korean restaurants over there so much! Maybe not too traditional, but good enough!!!