Thursday, March 18, 2010

Speaking of our class activity on egg planning, I would like to start with mentioning that I was lucky to work in my team. It was easy to work together with my teammates because everyone was enthusiastic, talkative and had ideas; we didn’t waist time on getting over being shy. As for our planning process, I can define the following steps:

  1. Define your goals and objectives.

This was probably the step that we spent the least time, because the goal and objectives were clearly explained by the professor. And by the time we formed a group all of us clearly knew that we need to make some sort of cushion for an egg in 30 min. So, in about few minutes we went to the next step.

  1. Determine your resources and current status vis-รก-vis objectives.

This was the step when we recapped on the resources that we had which was 2ft of tape and 8 straws. Then we were asking each other if any of us had a previous experience of doing something like this; or may be someone had some sort of knowledge for example in physics that might help in designing the egg protector. In about 4-5 min we moved on to the next step.

  1. Develop several alternative strategies.

At this point we started collecting different ideas on how to construct the protector. We had few ideas, such as to make a cube out of straws and make the egg hang inside; also we had almost the same idea as the winning team, which was to hang up the egg on a long string to decrease the falling distance of the egg, one more idea was to construct some sort of a cone out of straws for the egg. Few people out of our team were drawing the possible constructions.

  1. Make a tactical plan.

At this step we came to a conclusion to make a cone-like structure to protect the egg. We declined the rest of the ideas as we thought they were too complicated to be made in the remaining time. We didn’t allocate jobs or roles for our team. I think it didn’t really come across our minds, I personally think it wasn’t as important for our type of activity.

  1. Implement the plan and evaluate results.

As soon as we got our materials, we started working on the project. I can say that every member of the team was involved. No one was just standing by and watching. Someone was holding the egg, someone was giving out tape in portions, someone was cutting straws in pieces, a couple of people were holding the straws in place and someone was taping the whole thing together. As a result pretty much did the structure we planned to do; we didn’t have to change anything while implementing our plan. Unfortunately our egg broke, but we were not disappointed in the way we worked as a team because we did choose the best option we had and we didn’t dismiss any other ideas; we all felt like we did our best as a team.

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