On Tuesday September 24th, 2019, our science class had a Skype chat with Tim Mepham, a man close to the age of 80, who lives at Nicola Lodge. Tim is a man with Huntington’s disease, which creates some problems with movement, communication and dexterity for him. During our first interaction, we found that Tim was a smart person and used to be a teacher, but he is now cared for by others, including his daughter Nicola, who would answer or repeat what Tim had answered when we asked during our Skype chats.

My group tried their best to create a case of sorts to help Tim see which buttons do what and cover anything that he would not be interested in using for a TV remote. Despite our best efforts and many, many different attempts to design something using Tinkercad, we never ended up making a design we thought might work. We chose to buy a remote that would hopefully suit Tim’s needs instead. Other reasons for this decision are that we do not have access to his remote to use as a model, measure, test our creation with and we did not have access to a 3-D printer that would have been big enough to print what we were trying to make.

Through the repeated usage of Tinkercad, I did learn quite a bit about how to use it. It is not something I can say I enjoyed using a lot, but I am happy I learned the skills necessary for using it. It all was almost useless for this project because we never ended up knowing exactly what we needed to make so that our idea could work, but it may end up helping me out in the future, I also learned a bit more on how to communicate with group members even when it is difficult. One member of my group was extremely quite and had to be encouraged to speak and had to be repeatedly asked to repeat herself and the other had a lot going on, so she was not always at school the days we had to work on the project. I learned how to deal with these types of difficulties, although it definitely was not easy. I think that knowing how to communicate properly with others is extremely important and is something I have always had difficulty with so I am glad I learned how to do. I would say that I met my learning goals from these two things alone, because I had originally found both so difficult.

I wish I had better managed my time while we were working on this project. I had a lot going on during the time we really wanted to use to get this done and I ended up not doing what I would say is the best I could have possibly done. It might have been, considering I was under a lot of stress, but I wish I had spent more time on it so I could have created something with the potential to help Tim out rather than buy something, because the entire process seems like a waste when it ends up like that.

Overall, the connections-based learning experience was alright. I did not enjoy it because of a large amount of unusual failures on my part and the stress myself and one of my group mates had undergone during this time, but I would try this again for a better result if I had the chance and more time to focus on it.