Our experience with this assignment was pretty good. We got to do more independent work and oversee the making of our own project. I think doing independent work is good in school because it can teach you how to stay on task and get your work done. This project taught us a lot. We learned that you shouldn’t be to ambitious. Our group thought we where going to be able to make a T.V. remote for Tim without any prior knowledge. We learned near the end of the project that we did not have the skills to complete this assignment. One thing I wish I did was learn this earlier, this would have allowed me to suggest to my group to change up our plan earlier. We decided that we needed to make something more simple and more practical concerning the amount of skill that we had. We found a design for a signature guild witch could legitimately help Tim whenever he has to sign any important documents. Coming up with the idea of making something more simple but still quite useful was apart of the second lesson I learned when making this project, always be open to change. If we did not change our plan later we would have nothing to give to Tim, we would come out empty handed. Even if we came out of the assignment with nothing at all we would still come out with the valuable lessons that we learned during the assignment witch will help us later on other assignments or even after we graduate and leave to get jobs.
During this project I have acquired a few skills including designing and better communication skills. While coming up with ideas and the while designing we had to communicate and come up with something that we all liked, this required communication and cooperating skills. This skill is actually one that we will use in the work force and one that the new curriculum is trying to teach kids more and more. We also found out more about the designing process and how to keep improving on your design. You should usually start with a rough draft that has some flaws that you will keep ironing out as you improve your design. This idea is the basis of all design and how new innovations are made today. We used our designing skills while trying to make out remote, as we went we kept improving the design. Although we did not have enough time or skill to finish it we still got lots of practice in the designing process. I think I have somewhat met my learning goals getting better at the designing process, although we did not finish I think it was a partial success.
The collaboration with Tim went OK with us. We didn’t finish our original plan because it was a little to ambitious, making a whole new innovation for someone is quite a hard process without lots of people to come up with ideas. Even if we didn’t finish our idea we still came out with a lot of lessons like not being to ambitious. Next time I would have started with a simpler idea to make the end goal more obtainable and insight. I would have also done more research on other ideas that our group could have made that would still be useful to Tim but much easier to execute. Overall the connections based learning experience is a good idea but is hard for students to execute well. There is a lot more at steak than just a regular project because we want to help Tim. As well as being a self directed project witch makes it harder to complete because we have to make our own ideas and tasks it overall made this project one of the harder ones to accomplish in my school career.
Great job creating a tool that Tim can use to help him write. I don’t want you to stop your ambition but am glad that you learned to evaluate what can be done and what is off the table. I am glad you developed your communication and design skills as well. You are right that the stakes are higher when involved in connections-based learning but I believe the results are so much better.