This week's session notes - Session 27 (13 November 2018)

Hi everyone

Today was our last practical day and our final classroom session for the semester, so we tackled the problem of The Great Egg Throw.

The Great Egg Throw is a team challenge in which you need to devise a way to throw a raw egg further than any other team, without breaking the egg. Each team is given a raw egg (wrapped in gladwrap!) and roughly an hour in which to scavenge any resources that they needed to complete the task successfully. Each team is also given an instruction sheet with various additional rules (e.g. stay on the campus; don’t use the faculty admin office; make sure that you behave ethically and responsibly; etc.)

(We modified the rules slightly today, as we only had one team competing! Our dual objective was to throw the egg as far as we could without breaking it and to better the record distances of previous groups).

The Great Egg Throw 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 these 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.

When you reflect on your performance after the event, you might like to think about some of the following:

* Planning the best solution to the GET (this is the overall Task Problem)

* Finding resources which could help you (this is the Resource Problem)

* Bringing it all together (this is the Execution Problem)

* Examining how you make your group decisions during this exercise

* Considering ethical and socially responsible activity during this exercise.

There are also various PSDM decisions which you may need to make along the way. For instance, how did your group handle disagreements or different opinions? Did your group solve problems by making:

* Random decisions?

* Take turns deciding?

* Delegated authority?

* Shared discussion?

* Participatory voting?

* Consensus (unanimous; disagree and commit)?

You might also like to think about how ethics and social responsibility affect your choices, with regard to:

* Ownership of the resources and materials which you used in the GET?

* Permission to use these resources and materials?

* Safety?

* Fair / unfair?

* Sustainability?

* Wastage?

* Clean up?

(In previous years, each team has been asked to test their activity against one of four PSDM models which we have discussed in class and you might like to try this in your own time, using some of the models that you are familiar with.)

So, with all that in mind, we are now near the end of the PSDM paper. The Turnitin facility should now be live on Moodle so that you can submit Assignment 4 on Thursday (15 November). If you have any problem using Turnitin then send your assignment directly to me at phil.sales@whitireia.ac.nz.

The provisional results will be out as soon as I have marked them and final results will be available after the Markers’ Meeting in December.

Good luck with your studies in 2019 and also to those seeking work offers!

Cheers

Phil