The Rube Goldberg machine was our first project assigned to us in stem. Sense it was the first project, my group and I had many issues involving cooperation, leadership roles and work ethic. I am cooperative and an essential team member that can bring positivity and ideas to the team. Although I can sometimes come off as bossy and take charge when I see someone doing something that I do not agree with. I realized that I can not do everything by self and I need to let other people shine. Team members are great because they can bring skills to the team that I might not be good at.
During the first few days of working on the project my group and I didn't get along to much sense my team member and I had never met our other team member. One of the team members immediately decided to be the leader when I also wanted to be the leader. This was a problem because we would always clash heads with each other and things we wanted to say were not getting translated through. The other team member was cooperative and friendlier than the other team member and myself included. We had trouble coming up with a theme for our machine because everyone had different ideas. My team member and I wanted to have the theme be space but the other one didn't like that idea. So we listened out to the other team member ideas and came to a vote that outer space was the best and easiest idea. We began to work better as a team and shared out our ideas before we jumped in to the idea without asking someone.
I realized that in order to solve our communication skills we needed to have a group discussion. The group discussion I believe helped us out a lot because were able to get things done more efficiently. When it came time to constructing the key parts of our project we split up and did our individual tasks we agreed upon as a team. I mainly decorated the entire board and sawed wood in order to make dominoes, a rocket ship, and ramps. While my other group members mad a pulley system built a lever and screwed in all of our pieces to make sure that ten steps were incorporated into our project.
The last few days were days to finish and tweaked last and final steps we needed to add to the board. We worked hard and made goals for our team everyday. My group members and I made slide shows for our presentation while the other team member made the final blue print and add pieces to the board. I learned that when working in a group project it is key to split the work up evenly.
Overall, my first project in stem had a couple bumps but there were also great things that came out of this. I learned how to share the workload and not take it on all by myself, I learned how to talk out problems and also I became great at showing empathy toward others. Now I will be more prepared for our next project.