In the egg drop activity in my management class, our egg " committed suicide" like most groups' eggs. Why so? I believe it's our fault. If we have given them " extra care" before hand, they might have survived.
In the planning process. it consists of 5 steps: 1) define goals and objectives; 2) determine resources and current status vis-a-vis objectives; 3) develop several alternative strategies; 4) make a tactical plan; 5) implement the plan and evaluate results. But as I mentioned before, IF our group have given the egg "extra care", it wouldn't break itself that hard. Obviously, our group bypassed some steps in the planning process.
We know what our goal/objectives clearly. That's to use eight straws to "protect" the egg, whatever shape/ structure it will be, so that even the egg won't break even it is dropped from 10 feet high. The only criteria is that half of the shell needed to be seen. How to use only eight straws and tape to do this in 20 minutes is kinda challenging. Lastly one of our group member suggested to make a hexagon to protect the egg. Of course, it failed. The idea of making a hexagon is good in theory. However, we ignored other factors -- the tape and the height. The tape was obviously not strong enough to support the egg for this height.
One of the problem is that we didn't develop several alternative strategies. Time is a constrain. We didn't have enough time for contingence plans. The other problem is that, some of the group members are too insist on their ideas, which made them ignoring other's idea. Not even putting them into back up plans. Made it worse, we didn't have clear roles for each one. Some of us just stood there looking other members dealing with the egg and straws. Moreover, we didn't evaluate our result.
If we have a second chance to do it again, we must have better planning. First of all, we should have back up plan, so that we'll have a second chance to reduce the risk. Like one of the famous term, " dont put all eggs into one basket". Second, we should have consider all factors that would affect the result. We put too much focus on the egg and straws, but we forgot the role of the tape.
Third, we should have clearer roles. We should know who is going to be the leader of the group, who will be the builder, who will be the supervisors, etc. Last but not the least, we should have time to discuss and evaluate the results. So that we could know what we did right and what we did wrong. Then we could learn from the wrong.
Anyway, this is a good experience =)
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Right there with you. Our egg committed suicide too =]. Time went by way too fast and we were rushing to get everything done. Not everyone was able to get their hands on the egg, afriad that during the passing the egg might slip and crack. I don't think every group got any alternative strategies because this whole thing was timed and there was just not enough time to spend on the making process. But overall the class was super fun, time gone by very fast. Hope we get to do something similar in the future.
ReplyDeleteI like your suicide analogy, but I don't think that not having an alternative plan was the problem. Even if you had an alternate plan, you would not be able to implement it because you would have already lost your suicidal egg.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, it was still a blast playing with an egg during class time.:)