Wednesday 4/20- Home Depot day

Today's venture has been stressful and intense. As a part of media and marketing, I went to Home Depot to record the process of buying materials. But first we needed to finalize our material list which was far more difficult than it sounds as our project changed since last class, and the list needed a great deal of editing. Once at the store, we rushed to find our materials, partly split up, partly working together. 

 

While we were at the store, the rest of the team learned about leadership and projects. Once we returned back to the school, the team split up to work on the project, cutting wood and metal. I started cutting out metal leaves for the instrument Bryant and I are making, and recruited a couple others to help speed up the process. 

Now for the stressful and intense part. Einstein said spend 50 minutes defining the problem and 10 minutes solving it. But I don't think Einstein had to design and construct instrument shaped like flowers with only a day or so of planning, and a couple hours worth of making a list of materials and schedules. I feel that with a budget as large as ours, we should've had more time to take the advice we had received from the teachers and videos, and plan out our project in a more detailed manner. Because I feel that the teachers have high hopes for this project considering the amount of money going int it, I think the groups could have benefited from more planing and revising. Not by talking in small groups, but by making a small prototype to see what needs to change. The biggest challenged for me as an engineer in this project, is that I am not familiar with the thousands of materials at Home Depot that I have to work with, so come material list time, I wasn't exactly sure what to put down. For this reason, another prototype would've been helpful. In addition, it seemed that one of the team leaders had created an instrument plan on his own and added materials to the list for it, but failed to add some materials for thing we had designed as group. This forced me to take over a bit of leadership and straighten out what we were actually about to make.

By the end of 3rd block, I was a bit more hopeful about the fate our project than at the start of the day, and excited to continue working. Hopefully now that our plan is more clear, our project will run a little more smoothly.