Problem Based Project Reflection

     For my problem based project, I , like the majority of the class, decided to work on promoting the course in an effort to get its numbers up for next year.  At the beginning of the project, the team was a little bit unfocused, which lead to not a lot of work being done before spring break. However, once the tight timeline caught up to us after spring break, we began to work more efficiently on the project.

     I was mainly involved in 2 components of the  project: poster making and presenting to classes. During the poster making project, I am proud to say that the drafting of the poster went quite smoothly and efficiently. The efficiency was something that I feel was important, especially given our timeline, though the posters did feel unfinished to me. Had we been given more time, then I would have done them differently, but again with the time we had they turned out okay. I enjoyed being able to work well with someone that I didn't know too well, as I have occasionally found this to be a struggle for me in the past. I was happy to see that a lot of other people came in on their lunch time to help colour posters and hang them up later. The willingness for our class to go above and beyond what was expected of them is something that I think to be crucial for the project to have a chance at being successful.

    However, there were a few complications and mis-communications that occurred during the hanging of the posters. The first complication was the course change deadline. As the course promotion happened "last minute", the deadline for changing courses came at an earlier date than we had hoped. Due to this, we had to change the date of our lunchtime info-session to an earlier date to accommodate this. Unfortunately, the posters had already been printed with the original date on them. We came up with the solution to simply manually change all of the dates on the posters. However, due to a mis-communication on my part, some of the posters ended up being changed to the wrong date. This reminded me to be very clear about what I am saying when I am giving out information in the future. Once this mistake was discovered, we went back and double checked all the posters for the right date and changed the dates that were incorrect. Although this part of the project didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped, we had the benefit of being able to see the mistakes that we made and to learn from them in the future. This series of challenges also helped us to develop skills in problem solving, particularly when we had to decide how to fix our information session.

     The second part of the project that I was involved in was presenting our course to classes in the school. I am not going to lie, I was definitely nervous. This was mostly because I had to present in front of so many people, but I felt that it was important to take part in this aspect of the project and to push myself when I'm uncomfortable. During group discussion, I felt that I was definitely quieter than I should have been. I feel that this was mainly because I wasn't 100% confident in my ideas and the perfectionist in me made me feel that I needed to be absolutely sure of what I was saying. As the project continued, I did speak more, but not to the level that I would have hoped. This experience encourages me to try and speak more in the future and helps to remind me to let my ideas out without always having all the details worked out. It is something that I am working on and will continue to work on in the future.

     In terms of the actual presentation, I think that it went better than I had expected. When I say this, I mean that I ended up being less nervous than I had felt in the previous days. During our first presentation, I was nervous, but as we progressed in our presentation and had done it a few times, I felt that I had a better idea of what to say and I felt more comfortable doing it. Perhaps if I were to practice my presentation more, then the nervousness would be lessened even more. I found that not all of the classes were interested in the course, as was expected, but I was glad to see that some classes took the opportunity to ask questions and found an interest in what the course had to offer. I noticed that there seemed to be more interest in the younger grades than the older grades.