For building a working Rube Goldberg for my first year project there were some defects that I noticed in myself and my group. I am easy to work with, I can listen well to others ideas and do what is told to the best of my ability. However, I found that during this new experience I don't like to take the my abilities to the "leader scale". I realized that I can not lean on my teammates to take initiative all the time. I have the same capability my teammates have just choose not to use them in fear. This pushed me out of my comfort zone by a big number but I learned that everyone has an equally big role and that one can not just listen and stay quite but that they must also take off the weight and put them on their own shoulders. How I need to bring myself to do more work to help lead my group to success.
In the beginning of the project, the planning was drawn with ease and we communicated our feelings in a well ordered manner and had our original blueprint down fast. But heading to the start of the build I noticed that my two group members both have a strong opinion and both also had powerful leader desire. Though there were some bumps, eventually they were able to over come their different opinions and find a way to compromise to were they were both pleased. In these situations I preferred to stand aside because of the lack of leadership I had. Though I believed it benefited in my type of group, to be the silence breaker and the tie breaker.
During the construction section of our machine my group and I choose to freestyle how we would split the work. We did each step together and only separated the work when wood pieces had to be cut and other building pieces. We screwed, nailed, thought, and painted our whole project together, it most likely would have gone faster splitting up but I personally think that it couldn't have worked better. We ended just on time and began to work on our presentation slides. But we found a we errors in our machine and split up so two would work on the presentation and one work on the minor problems that went unnoticed.
While making it to the end of our machine and heading towards our presentation I had to leave my group for a few days. But once I returned the machine was fully painted and a few designed were painted on. Our presentation slides went smooth but went a bit rough on the math part. We soon over came them by asking other students and Mrs. Williams for help understanding. We decided how we would split up the work and since we had twelve steps and three group members (including myself) that dividing that would give us four slides to present and once extra long slide each, giving all of us equal presentation work and time. Though my group did very well personally. I stumbled a few times on my last slide a few times which was hard to keep my confidence up which one of my group member reassured that it was alright.
Overall, this project was a nice way to interact in the beginning of a new learning environment and school year. I got to learn that I need to branch out more and start portraying more of a leader rather than a follower. This will make me a better teammate in the future because it helped me reflected on myself that I have to help solve problems rather then just nob my head and watch them get made. I can see now what I need to progress in order to do better in my next future project.