Democracy can be annoying...

...and our class decision making proved it.
The reason for this kind of assumption is based on my personal experience.
Don't get me wrong, I believe we did accomplish a lot but not all that we could and the process of reaching to the final agreement was painful and poorly organized which probably arose from the fact that there were no set rules as who is to direct the whole process and who's opinion is to have more impact.
In terms of how I handled this conflict situation I can say it was a mix of different approaches. At the begging I looked at what was happening and started collaborating with others in order to hear their opinions and try to come up with the best solution. Pretty fast we came up with two proposals that all of us agreed. The third proposal was a cause of many different opinions about how should we deal with multiple choice questions and essay questions. It seamed like the most beneficial way of resolving such situation of conflict with many different opinions. This problem only became more evident when I heard the different opinions not only within the group I was discussing it but when most of the class got engaged in the discussion and when it became obvious that there are few issues that we will never reach a 100 % consensus.
Faced with this situations and with time running out I used compromise and accommodation when it came to voting. I accommodated the will of the majority and compromised so that decision is made on time.
To put it into perspective I felt that the essay part needed to be changed in a way that we should be given 3 or more questions and given the opportunity to chose one. This, in my opinion, is far better than only being limited to one question and if your knowledge on one module is weaker the chances are greater you will find one questions within the three that you would feel more confident about and that you can answer appropriately, which is not the case payed little attention to a one or two modules.
Only thing I should have done differently is to try to be more assertive and patient with the fact that people have different insight in how to solve problems, however when you are facing time constraint and more than one person who strongly opposes your argument you can only choose go with majority vote and regret that they were not open-minded enough to listen to an opinion that benefits all.

Eggs-cellent Way to Plan

Let's see, how would I evaluate our group work that ended in failure of achieving our assigned objective. Suprisingly enough I think that we worked well as agroup and I think that ,regardless of the fact that our poor egg broke, we did a good job.


Step 1: Our goals and objectives were already defined by the professor so no work was needed on our side.

Step 2: Some resources were given to us (egg, straws, tape) others we had to explore as we progressed since we had no way of knowing each others skills knowledge...

Step 3: This part of the process we spent most time on, I feel for the good reason since each of us had an idea what would be the best way to develop contraption that would keep the egg safe from braking. All of us had time to explain how would his idea look and work while others were able to ask questions and point out possible problems with execution. After all of us have spoken we decided upon one idea that , all of us felt, would work and would be easiest to and fastest to construct.

Step 4: After deciding on which of the alternatives we would follow, we started delegating responsibilities based upon what each of us felt most comfortable with .We all participated in construction of the contraption.

Step 5: With limited time left, we started on putting our idea into reality and things were not as easy to perform as we originally planed.
We had problem with putting the straws in shape (triangle) that would be firm and flexible at the same time and hence more likely to protect the egg. Also we had a problem of placing as many triangle-shaped straws together so they don't interfere with one another and hold their original shape.
We understood that the contraption will not look the same and nowhere as pretty as we originally planned but we decided since there is no time to build anything new we would continue with the initial plan because any contraption is better than no contraption.

As mentioned earlier our egg broke and we could not be happy because of that, however the level of team spirit, involvement of team members, respect for different opinion, democracy in deciding as well as overall enthusiasm, all these made this group project a pleasurable experience and made me feel satisfied with the way we approached the problem.
Only thing that I feel we needed was more time so I guess in the next project maybe we should dedicate difference time periods for different steps, however since problems are not always the same and since different steps might be more important, especially planning I still feel that overall we did a good job.