Today we started what has apparently became an infamous Lego challenge. We broke up into groups, quickly assigned them to different parts of the challenge, and began to concoct our individual theories for how we could attempt that to solve that specific part of the puzzle. While there were occasion whole cadre conversations, most of time was spent on the individual implementation. Some members of the team were quick to throw out solutions and start building away than I was. As we would go through, we would try to see how our design was matching with the other teams on both sides of us (In retrospect, I would rather have been assigned Team 1 or 4 which deals with one less problem—either the passing or the catching). Before we could even prove out our theory, we were readjusting our design to fit the specs of others. Inevitably, while we may not have physically had as complete of a robot design, I really good with the progress we had made. We have the foundation of a robot that feels comfortable and know what action steps we need to take next.
I have never played with robotics and haven’t been around a lot of Legos. I began researching best practices, learning from others previous mistakes, and analyzing what would be the best solution for us. Additionally, I started mapping out the stage on the whiteboard. While this personally made me feel more comfortable, I don’t believe it was incredibly valuable for the team. They had made it much farther on a different strategy and it would have been hard to implement anything I was learning at that point. Understanding this, I moved to a different strategy of helping in the building process.
Knowing that my knowledge base with Legos was low, it’s easy to feel like you could best serve by researching from prior knowledge sources. I’m also one who has been taught the motto to “measure twice and cut once.” While this is a great model of thinking for project that are permanent, Legos are the farthest thing from permanent. This wasn’t an effective strategy because designing is usually more about designing to elements that are out of your control as opposed to ones that are in your control. And while I felt incompetent in a builder role, at the time, it was a higher need for the project than reading from others—thus I reprioritized my contributions.
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