Monday, March 22, 2010

A Fresh Start

First of all, I named this entry a fresh start because in a way, the professor allowed the class to still earn a good grade even if we did poorly on the first exam. It's as if we got a fresh start because we still have a chance to do well in the class. I thought that the decision making activity was very educational and at the same time benefitial, something I will definitely take away with me after the semester is over.
I personally used the compromise method to handle the situation we were facing. I listened to all the options and opinions carefully and was willing to accept several of the options. I chose this method because in my personal opinion and experience, it is the most successful. I believe that when it is difficult to make a decision, compromising is the best way to go, especially in a scenario like this when people have different grades and liked different parts of the exam (ex: essay, no essay, multiple multiple choice, etc).
Consequently, I still think I would have chosen to use a compromising method because I think it is very fair to meet in the middle. For instance, when nobody could decide what to do with our next exam, we just compromised and decided to leave it up to the professor. I felt like that eliminated the chaos of coming up with a solution some people might not have liked. Compromising makes it equal for all classmates and I believe that is the best solution for eliminating problems of decision making. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is always the best solution, but in our particular case I believe it was.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Planning Of My Group

To be entirely honest, my group and I didn't succeed at building an effective egg protector, however we did work well as a team. We followed all the steps of planning although not realizing it. Obviously we defined our goal, which was to make a great egg protector and get the 5 point extra credit lol. Secondly, we spoke about the limited resources that we had and how we needed to utilize them all in order to build the best cage. Next, we did develop several alternative strategies because we thought about the various types of cages we could make and the impact each would have if we were to drop the egg in it. Step 4 which talks about making a tactical plan was also used by our group. We decided on which cage to make and each and every member had a job to perform. Finally, we implemented the plan by building the cage we agreed on but unfortunately our egg protector was not good enough.
I would say my group did pretty well together. We didn't argue, listened to each person's suggestions and each one of us helped out. It was entirely a group effort as I thought it should of been. By the last minute however, we started to all panic because our egg protector was incomplete and just made almost anything but that's okay because it was fun and educational.
As a group, we could of been more effective if we didn't really change our minds about the cage we wanted to make last minute. We kept thinking a different design would be better and as a result lost a lot of time on that.
This was definitely a very fun experiement =-)