Today marks the end of the 7th week since the start of the new semester. I have attended all 6 STEAM classes, and have met with my team every Wednesday since the second week, excluding this reading week. At this point, I am feeling a lot more confident in terms of what I need to do in this course, and what skills I need to have. Although many of the assignments have seemed to be overwhelming at first, by the time me and my classmates get working on them, they always end up being easier (and a lot less work!) than I thought.
Over the past few weeks, my team members have really warmed up to each other. While the first few meetings were somewhat awkward, we are now able to communicate much more freely and openly. There is no tension or hostility between any of us, and the team dynamic is light and cheerful. In terms of skills, we seem to have identified what each member is most confident in and capable of, and are using this in all of our assignments to determine how to get the best results. In areas where multiple people have similar skills, we allow them to work together, to come up with multiple possibilities. For our Project Deliverables A and B, we divided the work, assigned roles to people ahead of time, and determined a timeline for when things would get done. Project Deliverable C was a bit more shaky, as a lot of members forgot about it because of reading week. As a result, the workloads were slightly more unbalanced than for the other assignments, and not all of the members ended up working on it. That ended up being a bit stressful, especially when we were trying to finish it at the last second, but because the people who didn’t work as much on this assignment have put in a lot more work for our past assignments, I don’t think it’s something that will cause too much tension in the future. My teammates don’t seem to be picky about only doing their assigned portions of work. When one of us is finished with our work, we always offer to help each other.
With regards to our final project, I believe we have made good progress through our weekly meetings. Right now, we are the stage where we have made multiple physical prototypes, as well as a sound prototype, as presented in class. Through the class’s feedback, we have identified which elements of our project they preferred, and which they thought needed some work. For example, they preferred the all-black spray painted model to the unpainted model. We have already made a general plan for what we will all be doing for the rest of the semester to finish the project, as well as what we will work on in our next meeting. As artists, another teammate and I were assigned to be in charge of the project’s visuals. We will be experimenting with fabrics and recyclable materials, trying to mount them on a surface, and making an effort to put together an overall satisfying, creepy-looking model design. I believe we will also be attempting to contact potential clients soon, although I do not know the exact date when that will happen.
For our teach-a-skill section of the semester, I will be teaching my classmates how to use Isadora, a programming software that deals with triggers and interactivity. This software was taught to me in my Lively Objects and Spaces class last semester, so while I do not have an in-depth knowledge of all of it’s aspects, I still have a general awareness of how it works, and what kind of things it can be used for.
As far as the concerns I had in my first blog, I think the communication aspect is still somewhat there. For example, for our Project Deliverable C, when I messaged our teammates about it, only one of them replied back, and started working on it with me. The next day, first one responded, then another started working on it. Eventually the last member finally responded and helped us work on it, but it was only in the last half hour that we were working on it. It is not uncommon for some of my teammates to disappear for long periods of time, and at that point it is almost impossible to contact them. This does not happen often, though, and I think by keeping track of what people are supposed to do, and when they are supposed to do them, we are able to minimize the potential issues this may bring. It is only when unexpected things occur that it can be a bit of an issue. As long as we are on top of our tasks, it doesn’t have too much of an impact, and we can continue to work together with good feelings.
A Journey Through STEAM 