Team Collab

How was your team formed? Was your team assigned or did you choose to work with each other?

The team was formed because 3 of the 4 members were already friends. The fourth member, Twarner491, was actually new to Charlotte Latin School this year. The other three heard that he was very involved in engineering, so they "recruited" him before actually meeting in person. This proved to be an amazing decision as the four are now very good friends and have immensely enjoyed the time they have spent on the eCYBERMISSION project this year. Each member had a designated job. For example, TheBelgian2603 created a fixed schedule for the team and worked on research. He also worked a lot on the website you are reading right now. Twarner491 worked on the wiring for the product and did some code. He was also very involved in the writing of the Mission Folder. Legend did some coding for the project and also did many hours of labor on the Toe Hawks Google Sites page where our mission folder was stored and the rest of our project was described to anyone who might express interest in our long journey over the past seven months.

Provide a detailed description of each team member's responsibilities and jobs during your work on the Mission Folder.

We all worked equally on the writing of the Mission Folder. Each team member answered questions, and wrote their own biography. Based on the members' role in our product, they uploaded resources and product media to go along with their work. We all helped edit and review the answers to check for grammatical errors and other things of that nature.

Did your team face any problems working together? If so, how did you solve them? If not, why did you think you could work so well together?

We did have some problems working as a team. The first one was coming up with an idea. It took several weeks to come up with an idea that everybody agreed on and that everybody was willing to make a project on. The team also cycled through many ideas that would be agreed on and then several problems would arise or the group would discover that the idea had already come to fruition by another person. This caused a long and aggravating process for the group as it was not possible to begin working until we had a fresh and agreed upon idea. Another problem was to get everybody to participate equally. There were several times when a group member would claim that they would do something, and then they would miss the deadline for that task that the team had set together. This delayed our progress because a lot of the time that one thing was vital for that prototype. We were eventually able to avoid this problem by splitting up the work more equally amongst the group members so that one member who had a knowledge with a specific skill set would not be assigned all of the work correlated with this certain skill set. If there was a skill that one group member had and the others did not, the group collectively eventually became more understanding that this specific work was bound to take longer simply because there was much work to be done and only one member to do it. Our project continued much more smoothly after this contingency was resolved.

What were some possible advantages to working together as a team on this project? How would working as individuals have made this project more difficult?

One of the advantages is being able to split up the work among several group members. With such a big project and with so much work to do, it would have been near impossible to do all of it alone. It would even be difficult for a pair. A group of 4 members is the perfect size for a project such as this one. Another thing is that each member had their own special set of skills, for example Twarner491 has a deep understanding and knowledge of wiring and the hardware side of the project.