During my fall semester in junior year, I was assigned to create a Flappy Bird game with my fellow peers in my Software Design & Development plan. Since it was a group project, we broke down assignments equally among team members. One of my assigned tasks was to have the background of the game change from day to night periodically. I had a plan in mind and I thought I was 100% sure that it would work as changing the scene of the application seemed easy. However, the piece of code that I developed would not run properly where it impacted all the other objects in the game, and/or the background switch would never show up. I was adamant that my plan would work, and I took at least two days to debug and organize that code. However, this mindset and stubbornness delayed me from all the other tasks I had to do for the game within the set deadline my group and I agreed on.
It wasn't until I reached out to one of my group mates as well as the TA for their perspective that they both informed me that my original plan was overcomplicated for the task at hand. With the guidance of my peers, we ended up being able to execute the background change within an hour. Looking back, I wished I had let go of my plan sooner as I believe my stubbornness and fear of failure made me hold onto the plan for so long. Additionally, once I have a set perspective and plan, it can be hard for me to shift my gears because it was the only idea I had in mind.
I am still in the works of trying to change my mindset into being understanding of different perspectives. One can be open to perspectives but understanding perspectives is another thing. I remember the moment where I sat down with my group mate to gain her perspective, and how she would approach the task at hand. At first, she agreed with me and stated that what I was doing seemed accurate. However, after over 30 minutes and trying to understand the code on my laptop, it clicked to her why my piece of code wasn't working. She informed me that instead of piecing everything together, it would be better to create another function that calls a background change function to update the background. Once she explained that, everything clicked in my mind, and we both worked together on the code to successfully finish the task.