Specialising

One thing that has quickly become clear is that we do not have much time! At the beginning of the process I imagined a lovely gentle home ed scenario where we were super organised and everything just kind of slotted into place. The reality is life gets in the way no matter how committed everybody is, both mine and the rest of the teams. We are not exactly behind, given that the field kit was so late to arrive we really couldn't have got much further with the robot game before now, but we don't have any time to spare either. Which means we are going to have to specialise.

Back in February, I imagined that we would all work wonderfully together towards a common goal, each member of the team taking a role in each stage of the process and learning something about stuff they were not necessarily interested in. While I think we have achieved that to some extent but the nature of the competition means that everyone will have to concentrate on the parts of the challenge they have the most skills to complete and are most willing to give a go to. As a result we have split down into three sub teams.

The project is well underway. We have our Senior partner and have designed a product which we achieved by a process of elimination. Everyone went off to interview someone over 60 about what life was like now and how it was different to say when they were 20 or 40. From this we compiled a list of responses and picked out the common themes. After some discussion, several topics were chosen to take forward for further research which was then reported back to the team and a final decision about the overall subject and shape of the project was made.  LS and Q are taking on the task of more in depth research into the chosen topic and then putting together a presentation that involves the whole team. The first stage will be to do an in depth interview with our Senior partner which we are currently trying to set up.

Meanwhile the rest of the team have been busily constructing. The field kit didn't arrive until the 12th September, which just happens to be a Lego day, which meant that it was nearly a whole week with the kit sat there until the next meeting. we are underway now though and think we will have everything constructed, or very nearly by the end of the next session on Monday. The building instructions are a nuisance as they come on a CD which means only one person can build at once. It would be much easier if they were on paper and then the booklets could be split up and different team members build different things. As it is we had two teams of two and used a split screen on the laptop so we could have two sets of instructions up at once.

On Monday we are going to split down further. LS and Q will carry on with the project. LB, J and JS will begin constructing the robot and BP and JD will finish off the table and hopefully the field kit and then begin the progeramming on wednesday - or maybe next week!