Blog Topic #3

The class on 10/14/09 was crazy as hell. There were people screaming across the room, various people standing up and even more people just completely dazed and confuse. I was definitely one of those people (dazed and confused). I was in the "avoidance" state at first because I feel that the class will be able to make a decision, of which I would then agree with them because it's what the majority would want. However, when it seemed like no progress was being made and with the time running out, I'd joined in the frenzy. From the 5 ways of behavior slide, I don't think there were any "compete to win" behavior, the tone of the whole process was pretty much "compromise" and "collaborating", where the plan was to split up into smaller groups and then combine our ideas, this of course didn't worked out as planned. Even though it was unrealistic, to have 100% of the class to agree on a decision, it did show how difficult it is to make a decision with a large scale of people. The professor was very cynical by purposely trying to make individuals turn against the class, by saying, "you don't have to agree..." This made thing extremely difficult. It sucked that the class ended without deciding on the formatting of the test, due to few individuals, but at least we were able to get some changes out of it =/ Better something than nothing.

Blog Topic #2

DAMN!! Can't believe my group fail in the egg project. We did use most of the steps in the planning process. Such as defining our goals, determining our resources, and making a tactical plan. What we should've done was making alternate strategies as well. We had a few plans at first, but they got shut down because the engineering of it will probably lead to disaster. Eventually we had one plan, of which everyone agreed on. We had a pretty good design for our egg protection, but it could've definitely been improved (because the egg still cracked =/).
The idea of this assignment was to 'think outside of the box'. We didn't even go up to the table where the egg and tape was to examine the sizes. We simply gave an estimate of the sizes for our design. The group that used the tape as a rope for the egg, thus reducing the length of the fall was rather clever. It's thinking in that nature that will make the difference. Overall the best and most memorable class I've ever had. Definitely looking forward to future classes (can't believe I just said that, but hey, it was FUN :]).