Decisions Decisions!

Last week professor Kurpis gave us the most insane proposition for a curve I have ever heard in my life. The option for us to determine our own curve and grading of the test. The only catch was that the class had to be in 100% uniform agreement of this. Forty plus people with only 30 mins to decide, all hell was about to break loose. Personally I sat back and just Accomodated to what the group was going to decide on. I saw how crazy it was getting right off the bat and I just decided that the group would decide for me. I  did not want to put up with the chaos and I just kind of went with the flow. As for the rest of my class mates I definatley saw all 5 of the characterstics of decision makers in the group. (Avoidance, Competitive, Accomodation, Collaboration, Compromise.) It definatley was hectic but we all managed to pull it together and make a great decision. For future reference I decide that we change nothing, what we did may not have looked pretty, but it yeilded a great result and in the end thats all that matters.

An Egg-celent way to FAIL!

Recently, professor Kurpis gave us an assaignment which made all of us feel like little kids again. We had to design build and construct a way to protect an egg from an 8 foot drop. The only problem was, we were VERY limited to the amount of recources we had, and even worse, we were very limited to the amount of time we had. So our knowledge of Management kicked into gear. We started off as a group assesing the situation. We knew what we had to do so we had to figure out how to go about it. We decided who need to do what and how long should we spend on building the actual "contraption." We spent a good 30 minutes drawing up a few prototypes for our egg holder until we all voted on the one we thought would work best. We went with creating a cube like shape and suspending the egg in the middle. This in my opinion was a very good design we thought of, in the short amount of time we had. And comparativley to my classmates designs, we had the best one. Organizing and Planing this assaignment was definatley the easiest part for us, we had no problem working as a team, and choosing a design that would best work. We drew diagrams of how it would work and we prepared who should do what. The only problem for us came during the execution phase, when the egg-shell was to be built. Everybody did their part but we failed to forsee our tape usage, and we ended up using 3/4th's of our tape before we were even half way done taping our contraption. Not to mention the limited time that made me, and i bet most of my classmated nervous. As we finally taped the last peice together when mister Kurpis counted down the last 10 seconds of time we manage to pull it off and finish our conrtaption. The only problem for us, when we dropped the egg our design may have looked the most promising, but I'n pretty sure that it made the biggest splat out of everyones.
My final assesment of this experience was that It was a great experience to work on such a project with a time limit in a group. For future reference we need to plan more on being able to manage our resources correctly.
This was a great assignment from Mr. Kurpis!