Team

Right at the start of each meeting, I love to orchestrate a team exercise or a timed discussion on the week ahead. From this, I’ve been encouraged to summarise and catch everyone up on the talks I’ve given.

My first talk was on commitment, inspired by my former head of sixth form. I even used a whiteboard to represent it. Imagine your best friend coveting or missing an imperative personal possession that you both find in then, but is on the other side of an immovable and impenetrable wall (I said imagine Donald Trump’s forecasted wall). You can give your word that you will help but that isn’t enough. In this scenario, you throw one of your shoes over the wall, so your both stuck in a situation you need to get out of. This analogy might seem off but bare-with me. Milly understood it as putting yourself in a position where giving your word to commit to something means fully investing time, effort and more importantly action in a promise. As committing to a project means no full back other than the reality of dragging down your entire team. Back to the analogy, throwing over your shoe means no fall back and by acting yourself to think of a solution, you also help your best friend out at the same time. One simple example for this project holding yourself accountable to even do initial designs, by booking a room in the library to do it with other people.

My second talk was on thinking smartly and outside the box. Applicable when it comes to coding the servos on our project. I got this talk from a blog post on Quora, I will attach the link in this post. In doing this exercise I got the members of my team to close their eyes, be mindful of my voice and background noise whilst I painted the scenario in their heads.

My talks also touch on group exercises I conducted by me. Using games that I learnt from working as Camp Counsellor in Canada in my last summer. They go by the name of heart beat and Johnny Woop. In the latter game, I used the analogy “Think of the exit function we would write at the end of our program (Kurtosis in C language)”. They clocked it straight away.

Finally, in our recent meeting, I invited guest speaker and dear friend Shahzeb Mirza. He stud

ies mechanical engineering and I got him to do a short talk on gears and gear ratios. This lead to immense progress on understanding the mechanics of the claw in our arm. Following this I held a timed discussion on this subject, specifically what we learnt and how we can apply it to our design.

We ended this meeting by handing out tasks. Including; chasing up our 3D prints in queue, scale up the code to suit all five of our servos, researching the possibility of a 3-way rocker switch and switching to a 360 servos (full revolution).

In my next post, I will write upon the terminology that we use for this project and post our circuits and drawings. By making myself vulnerable and writing in third person to the public, I COMMIT myself for the next post. I also hand out punishments to those that are late but more and that in the near future.

Keith Marange

Project Manager

https://www.quora.com/What-do-people-need-to-most-understand-about-smart-work/answer/Sean-Kernan?ch=10&share=ce1d206a&srid=tyS8