Animoney
When I took INFO 200, it was supposed to be a fun class that I can take to balance out some of my tougher classes. However, little did I know that that class and the work that I would do would become an integral part of my future plans and whom I strive to be. Working in our group of 4, we spent the quarter working on designing an application that would help younger children learn more about the financial world. I helped build the prototype while taking part in weekly presentations demonstrating our progress. Working within my group and getting the opportunity to showcase our work to so many different people was a gratifying experience and helped me learn a lot more about my own values and the sort of work that I would be interested in doing in the future.
Having the opportunity to directly apply everything I was learning in class to a project was a new experience, but one that I really enjoyed. It helped me learn more about working in a group and navigating group dynamics while also being in a position to learn from others and help them learn. This helped me build my leadership skills as I led our presentations and also played a big part in coming up with the concept for the app. Furthermore, I learned about the world of UX design and the whole design process. This topic was quite novel to me and I found it to be very interesting. My interest only grew as the quarter passed and by the end of it this was a field that I wanted to be a part of in the future. Gaining experience in areas such as public speaking and leadership was very helpful to me personally as it helped me become more confident, as well as learn more about what I value. The technical skills that I learned will be quite useful in the future as it has introduced to an important facet of the technological world that I had not focused on before.
Being in this position helped me develop several skills such as :
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Conflict Negotiation - At the start, we could not agree on a topic for our application. There were a lot of ideas being thrown around and when we finalized on an idea there were some issues within the group. The lack of communication had led to misunderstandings within the group, which in turn had led to the buildup of tension between two of the members. For us to move past it and work as a team, it was important that we can move past the incident and trust each other so that we can create something we all can be proud of. In order to solve the conflict, my other partner and I helped oversee a conversation between the others and once the misunderstandings were settled, we ended up becoming a lot closer as a group which played a big part in our success.
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Group Development - As we worked throughout the quarter, one of our group members had to miss several meetings due to unforeseen circumstances. When they came back, they were quite behind on the material and we had continued moving on with our project. In order to help our groupmate catch-up, we all spent some extra time helping them catch up on the material and learn how to use the software we were using to build our prototype so that they can also play an important role in the creation of the app. Doing so helped each of us reinforce our knowledge and helped raise the level of our group substantially.
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Synthesis - While working on the prototype, each person worked individually on what they thought would be the best way to display information. When we got together to pick which way we want to proceed, we could not come to a conclusion. There were aspects in each design that would be beneficial and after much deliberation, I made another design that incorporated most of the things that we agreed on. This newer design was one that everyone could agree on. Incorporating everyone's ideas into one helped us find a new perspective to display our work. Just like each of our ideas had their strengths, so did each of us in the group and finding a way for all pieces to fit together is what helped our group succeed.