This week's session notes - Week 13 (6 November 2018)

Hi everyone

Today was our practical day, as we applied our problem solving and decision making knowledge to The Ball Game.

(You will be asked about this exercise in Assignment 4 so, if you missed today’s class, please ask your classmates about what they experienced).

The Ball Game is an opportunity for you to reflect on the ‘book learning’ that you have done so far, as part of this paper. What I would like you to do, is to think about how useful various PSDM models and techniques are in solving ‘everyday’ problems.

Quite often we just ‘do’ something when confronted by a problem. There may be no obvious process of identify-define-explore-action, DECIDE or ‘applying the scientific method’ in these situations. Today was an opportunity to solve a problem, to make decisions and to reflect on how the theory works in practice.

The Ball Game is a simple exercise in which a team has to pass a ball between team members in a shorter and shorter period of time. Between attempts you should have thought about what is going on and how you would describe the process that you used.

On the first attempt, our team took about 60 seconds to pass the ball eight times. The team quickly got this down to fifteen seconds and less, finally finishing on about 10 seconds. However, along the way, the team had to think about different methods / solutions to achieve better and better times.

As the pressure went on to reduce the time taken to pass the ball, the team had to find new / better ways to complete the task. On reflection, the earlier methods used were time-consuming and offered little opportunity to reduce the time down to the target time of less than two seconds. This required us to go from a programmed decision making response, towards a mix of critical evaluation of the rules of the ball game and creative input to find a workable solution.

Some things for you to think about include:

* Whether you used any identifiable process to accomplish the task?

* What steps you took to get your time down to ten seconds or less?

* Whether there are any applicable decision making models that helped you?

* Were there any particular problem solving techniques that you used during the exercise?

Often we begin solving a problem by starting with a ‘familiar’ solution which we have seen before, such as standing in a circle to pass the ball. As the task becomes more difficult (but still straight-forward) we might introduce critical thinking to help shape our solution. This approach is logical and sequential (e.g. “we can pass the ball quicker if we stand closer together and if we practice our passing technique”). If the task becomes ‘unrealistically’ difficult (e.g. get you time down to under two seconds) then we need to think more creatively by checking our objectives, questioning the rules and / or finding new ways of doing things. Our method of passing the ball through multiple hands was quite different at the end of the exercise from what it had been at the start!

Those students who have started preparing their answers for Assignment 4 will know that today’s work is very relevant to this assignment. The practical element of today’s work is intended to encourage you to think expansively about how you might arrive at solutions to various problems. It is one thing to ‘do’ a paper on PSDM but if you aren’t applying what you have learned to everyday problems then it all remains rather ‘academic’.

On Thursday, we will do an exercise which should help with the brick company exercise in Assignment 4. Next Tuesday will be the Great Egg Throw (weather and students permitting!) and then it is all over to you to finish Assignment 4 in time to hand it in on Thursday 15 November.

Remember to incorporate high-quality references in your assignment and to show me how deeply you are thinking about the tasks in Assignment 4. As mentioned today, I am less interested in reading about ‘what’ you did in the exercise today and more interested in the ‘why’ and ‘how’ elements. These are the important parts of tertiary-level learning!

See you all on Thursday!

Cheers

Phil