Monday, February 23, 2009

Moving Day!

A state of equilibrium has been reached within the halls of the FIEA cohort area. The teams have been finalized and everyone has found their home for the remainder of the Cohort 5 era. With team restructuring also comes seating rearrangement and that has been the focus of the team leads for the past few days. With 49 FIEAns working in the front space, we were already nearly at full desk capacity. Unequal team size, coupled with the walkway separating the two desk areas, created the need for Cohort 5 to spill over in to the space formerly used by Cohort 4. After many days of seating charts and discussions with the FIEA faculty, the slightly larger Drifters team has gotten the green light to move their entire operation into the next room and set up shop.

This week started with a flurry of boxes, chairs, action figures, cardboard cutouts, Nerf weapons, mini-fridges, and equipment being shuffled from desk to desk. Chaos was organized, both with desk toys and team member "cells" created. Meanwhile, Sultans of Scratch also got to regroup and organize their newly expanded team into their respective "cells" as well.

At the start of Cohort 5's first semester, students were seated according to track - art, programming, production - so they could assist each other and get to know their fellow track mates better. When the teams were formed for pre-production, everyone moved to sit with their teams, but the track groups seemed to stick together still, although in smaller concentrations. Now, the number of teams has decreased but the partial separation of tracks is still in place. While this may seem counter-productive to isolate the tracks, each team has taken steps to designate a producer to act as a liaison between the art team and programming team and the production team, to keep everyone on the same page.