Project Reflections
Jennifer
To be honest, when I went into this project, I didn't want to do it, but it was mandatory, it was going to be a lot of work, it was going to be costly (what happened to students not having to spend money on public school education?), and I was pretty sure the final write up would be terrible. Turns out I was right. Over the course of a week, which I still believe was too short to contain this project, I'm pretty sure combined the three of us have spent over 100hours working on this project not including the proposal (and re-proposal) and the website maintenance. Today, "Trebuchet Day", I've recognized that effort is not always consummated on the day of and Murphy's law always seems to hold true. After spending nigh-on 3 hours in negative degree weather yesterday to get our trebuchet just right, today was no cake-walk. We spent a good 2 hours today trying not to have the ball fly backwards, unfortunately we didn't hit any targets, from our apparatus's lack of consistency. On the bright side, I've learned much more about team work and trying to find time around everyone's busy schedules. I've learned more about technology, and semi-refined my website making skills, and how to use wiki-spaces and not to trust help icons. Although, I haven't enjoyed working on this project it was a ______(interesting, but not really, not relaxing, different?) change of pace from an ordinary work week.
Kim
When I first heard the word Trebuchet, all I was thinking about was a mark that I needed to do really well on. It would be a very easy task, with very easy marks. However, as soon as I had started to work on it with the group, my idea about the trebuchet changed. No longer was it just a project to get easy marks on; It was the mentally frustrating, time consuming project, but still fun at the same time. I along with my other group members were pushed with the rigorous hours and time limit, which in the end I find beneficial because when we go off to university we will have that stress, put upon us. Other thing that frustrated not only myself, but my group was that even spending all those hours; of going back and forth to rona, and staying over at my house till the late hours of the night, on the day of; the trebuchet did not perform. Mentally frustrated I along with my group tried everything, but the ball would either go really far or backwards; not a good thing. On the other hand, what I took from this is to try to reach that 100% because in the end you can never reach it you will just fall a few below; which in the end toned down the stress prone person that I am.
Srishti
When we started this project I wasn't sure what to expect out of it, but I was excited to see what we (my group) could come up with. I have never spent that much time on any project in my 12 years of schooling, but we worked diligently to accomplish what we had planned for the trebuchet. Overall, I think the time we got to built it, was very short (just over a week, because the proposals took a couple days to get approved and we couldn't start building it without an approval). As the week went by my excitement decreased because of the mental and physical stressful conditions we were in to complete this project to the best of our abilities. Specially on the day of calibration (outside in freezing cold weather for about 2 hours), I had lost my confidence because of the inconsistent results. Today, was the "Big Day: Launch Day" where we were outside again for over 2 hours in the cold weather, and it turned out to be what I had started to expect of this project (inaccurate results and A LOT of frustration). But on the good side, I learned how to manage my time and work with different people and ideas.