Now that I have had a few weeks of researching my idea and gathering notions as to how I can realize it, I felt it was time to organize a meeting with my supervisor Brenda Romero. She will be overseeing my thesis for the coming months, ensuring that I remain on the correct path. Her own background is primarily with game development but her expertise can certainly contribute to the design and development of a mobile application.

I found our meeting to be a very productive one. It was an opportunity for me to discard some elements of my project in order to focus on specifics. I was delighted to hear that she thought that my problem statement was a valid one. She appeared enthusiastic about the idea and provided me with helpful guidance. Some of the key issues she highlighted were:

• Gamification with mobile application is a fad. If I am researching sustainability, I need to keep in mind that gaming elements within apps is a trend that will soon be extinct.

• I have set myself tremendous goals that would be almost impossible to achieve. I need to refine my scope and focus on particular elements of my idea. If time permits, I can then address stretch goals

• My application idea is completely dependent on crowd sourcing. In other for my app to be successful I would need frequent contribution from users. Brenda highlighted how the data I am seeling could already exist online. For example, people frequently upload photos, create statuses, check in to places all via social network sites. I could extract data via their APIs and perform some analysis.

Coming out of this first meeting, I had plenty to look into. I do like the sound of collecting online social media data and analysing it over my original idea of requiring user to specifically contribute to my app. Going forward, I plan to look into data mining, how I can user this data to make predictions, consider all demographics through user stories and sketch up some initial rough sketches to get an idea of screenflow.

In a couple of weeks we must present our thesis ideas and the literature research we have performed so far. I am hoping that I will have a very strong grasp on my miniature goals by then in order to articulate my plan and objective..