Making Good Life Choices

Welcome back! On today’s blog, I will be reflecting on the entirety of my Planet Exploration project which I conducted in conjunction with my group, Josh T. and Tim D.

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Problem/Definition Statement

A team of astronauts need a form of transportation that is able to efficiently cover a minimum round trip distance of 5km from point A to point B. This form of transportation must be able to overcome the 3% Earth gravity of Ceres, below -105°C temperatures, rocky terrain and make the most of its limited power sources.

As a group, I think that our definition statement was fairly solid and we had no major problems that we encountered throughout the process because of that.

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Establishing Norms

Organisational Norms

I have worked with Josh T. in the past during a business education class project and I was a bit familiar with Tim’s ‘flow’ when it came to working. Josh was more of a ‘leader’ in the group and Tim was someone who can work hard but is lazy most of the time. I knew that Tim would have done his part well done though.

Communication Norms

It was fairly simple setting up a medium of communication out-of-class between our group as we just made an iMessage group chat as a medium to share and collaborate about anything in regards to our project.

For the most part, we never really had to communicate with teachers/mentors regarding the project too much and it was (in my opinion) spearheaded mostly internally in our group. When we did communicate, however, we tended to not have any major issues.

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The Plan

Initially during our process, we created an Apple Notes app to jot down notes and our rough brainstorming. We then started to eliminate potential ideas which were either out of our reach or were way too inefficient. However, after we got our general idea down, the rest of our project was a bit more spontaneous as shown in our CAD, where we all went in our own direction in a way.

I think our plan was pretty clear from the start, but the main problem we had was actually following through with that plan because we later realised that our plan wasn’t exactly fool-proof, along with the fact that we never really had a Plan B. This costed us a good chunk of time because we needed to think of ways to manoeuvre through our problems we encountered along the way.

Time Management

I feel like there were sometimes when we would be off-task but I think it gradually decreased as the project went on as our problems started to increase and the need to finish on time was looming more and more.

Unfortunately, however, we did not finish on time because our communication in-class got more abrupt and we never articulated what we were going to do each day, so the amount of work we did each day was inconsistent. In addition, some tasks required 1 person to do everything and there was nothing left to do for the other 2 group members. This was evident when Josh was working on the Arduino while Tim and I couldn’t really help because Josh works best when left alone.

What to do when things go sideways

We started to have opposing ideas on how the project would go later onto the project until we wasted too much time and needed to make do with what we had. This was definitely not what we thought would happen from the start; we thought our group would’ve had absolutely no problems. Our main issues were the fact that our 3d printed wheels didn’t come out like we had planned originally, forcing us to make do with what we had. In addition, our Arduino system didn’t work out in the end (which might’ve been mitigated if we had an Arduino expert in our group, which we don’t have).

Eventually, we kind of just decided that if we kept going deeper down the rabbit hole we would actually be a lost cause so we just decided to do it simple and fast so we could get the project over with so we wouldn’t cut into our personal project, using our incline test (which was the simplest one we had planned out).