 |
 |
| WHAT DID WE DO? WHAT'S NEW and CHANGED? (reflection and description of event / activity) |
EVIDENCE OF LEARNING (include artifacts, photos, videos, drawings, sketches) |
Today was a very productive and
interesting day for our group with a lot of changes and revisions. Starting the
day, we determined that the workshop would be the main idea with a mini cookbook
and possible social media page as smaller parts of the solution. Mr. Tate then
spoke to our group and stated that we had to generate new ideas that are very
different from the three we decided on. In fact, he said that we were not even
allowed to mention these ideas in our new ones because our ideas were too basic
and not revolutionary. The teachers then gave us 7 minutes to generate new
ideas. We were stumped. The ideas we came up with were not realistic or revolutionary.
At this moment, a few of us started to panic but this was actually a blessing
in disguise. Before the teachers left us to help other groups, Ms. Ricci posed
two significant questions that we had yet to answer. Are we truly passionate
about our topic? Who is the targeted audience? We decided to take a walk and
ended up sitting down on some lounge chairs and going around the group and
answering the questions posed by Ms. Ricci. Tim was the first to explain that
he was not passionate about the idea and if not everyone was passionate about
the idea then we knew we had to change. We looked through the google doc with
all of the different problems and still could not find one we all liked.
Finally, we returned to the classroom and again talked with Ms. Ricci. She led
us through some exercises, which made us list off ideas and not worry about the
quality of them. She brought up Play Kindergarten and from there a new idea for
our project was decided. How can we incorporate a fun learning space into the
school environment? This interaction with Ms. Ricci helped our team climb our
way out of the bottom of the U. We only had a few minutes to discus the new topic before
we switched directions into a new activity but in these few minutes, we were
able to brainstorm a few thoughts and decided that we can transform a classroom
into an activity area with games such as Ping-Pong and Legos. Also, during the product pitch, we received many insightful questions, which we immediately began discussion solutions for. Overall, our
struggles as a group and interactions with the teachers, led to us forming a new
problem and topic, which we are all passionate about.
|
  |
During our walk to try and generate new ideas, none of were really feeling particularly strong or passionate in any direction. That seems to have been our deepest "U" so far this project. When we discovered that we no longer wanted to pursue the original question, we decided to go back and look at different possible questions. When none of those really called to us, we went to talk to Mrs. Ricci and Mr. Tate. What seemed to be pretty helpful for our group was talking to other students, and our teachers about crazy ideas to open up our 'creative minds.'
ReplyDeleteGood, detailed summary. I think this touches on every single one of the basic points of what we went through today, though leaves out a lot of the social or emotional component. Perhaps it was only me who felt strongly (negatively) about changing the idea. I found myself deeply frustrated more than once (but most notably right before lunch, when we were told we couldn't use our entire workshop idea). And for me, the reasoning for such a restriction, though somewhat clear now, wasn't understandable at all in the beginning of the change. It wasn't so much that I couldn't let go of the idea--it was that I couldn't envision us leaping from it and landing anywhere feasible enough in the time we had. Time has been (and still is) my number one concern since we made the change. Currently, however, I think we've somehow been able to reach a decent place surprisingly quickly, which hopefully suggests fast progress in the future.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with this summary, Michael. I really like that you explained our thought process when we changed our idea, rather than just saying we changed our idea. I also appreciated how you explained that we were stuck in the bottom of the U and we were really having trouble climbing our way out of the U. In addition to this I think that you did a really good job giving Mrs. Ricci the credit that she deserves because she was the driving factor in our decision to change our question and product.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything Michael described in this summary, but I want to add some additional information. As he stated, I really wasn't passionate about our previous idea of getting people to eat and live more healthily. I also felt like the rest of my group members, besides Michael, lacked passion about this idea. The way I see it, this lack of passion was a major reason why we weren't able to come up with more revolutionary ideas. With these thoughts in mind, I encouraged us all to start looking for an idea that we would be more passionate about. We lamented the fact that Mikhail wasn't able to come to school, since we wanted to find a project idea that every single team member would be passionate about, but we knew we had to let go of our old idea. Fortunately, after discussing the new idea with Mikhail over Slack, he said that he's on board with our new direction. As we progress further with our project, I hope that we maintain--or even better, increase--our current level of passion. Throughout the remainder of our intensive, I would like to encourage my fellow teammates to speak up if they aren't feeling completely passionate about what we're doing. As for me, I absolutely love this new idea.
ReplyDeleteDespite my sickness today, I was impressed with what the rest of the group am up with. Their adaptability and fluid thinking served them well in generating new ideas. Our team continued to function well despite my sickness due to our good communication and time management. I can't accurately comment on what happened during the class today, but I can say that our team persevered and showed determination to come up with something novel. I think our group actually founds its real calling and passion today after previously struggling with the motivations and conviction in our prior ideas. I'm hoping I will be well tomorrow so I can help our group out more than I did today.
ReplyDelete