Category: Teamwork & Leadership

Work in a team

Year 9 camp reflection

Ayush Atre on

As we cooked dinner on Year 9 camp, the capability that my group improved on was Teamwork.

The destination was a remote place called Kalbarri. Since we were out in the
bush. We had to sleep in tents every night and cook in horrible little pots
called Trangias. They contained: bowls, chopping boards, blunt utensils, and a
place to light our fire. Now, having to cook in the sand every day was bad
enough. But to make matters worse, I was vegetarian. The only vegetarian in the
group. This created problems when working in cooking groups. I was fortunate
enough to be placed in a group with a good friend. But the other two members
were two students who, at first, didn’t take kindly to the fact that there was
another mouth to feed, one that couldn’t eat meat. That first night we were
deemed the messiest group as we didn’t work as a team, the cutting was uneven,
and the ingredients were all put late. It tasted, horrible. As we moved campsites,
our group managed to make a mess at every location. The group was so bad that
teachers even offered for me to work with a cleaner group.

I refused. 

This is because something had changed by then. Yes, we were messy, and we barely cooked anything good. But over all the time we spent cleaning up our mess, I found that I developed a connection with my group members. Not only strengthening the one with my friend but even a friendship with the other two.

By the end of camp, our final meal cooked as a group was perfect. We had divided our responsibilities between us and split the vegetarian and non-vegetarian section without flaw. We finally reached a level where we worked well together as group.

Engineering Project Y9

Ayush Atre on

Term 4 science was centered around the Earth. My classmates and I studied hard on volcanos, sections of the earth, deepest points on earth and water and most importantly, Earthquakes.

The project my group (Jaxon, Zaid and Marcus) and I worked on was to create a structure out of raw spaghetti sticks and blue-tac. Raw spaghetti is very brittle so this wasn’t going to be an easy task but my team and I were up for the challenge.

The first stage was planning. During this we made up to 11 different sketches of how the structure will look. This included notes on earthquake resistant build techniques implemented by real world scientists and engineers. The most prominent build style was cross bracing.

Cross Braced Frame with Pinned Braces - Expedition Workshed
Cross braced structure

Cross bracing is a technique used by engineers that involves a cross between two pillars. This transfers weight away from the structure during an earthquake and reinforces the pillars it’s attached to. We included this type of wall on all three sides of our structures.

Design 1

Our first structure was a huge success and it survived the shake test. It also met all of the requirements asked of us. But the problem with our design was the roof. The antenna swayed and appeared as if it would take the roof off. Fortunately it doesn’t but this is a risk that my team and I aren’t willing to take and it easily finds itself on the improvement list for design two.

Design 2

After noting down the parts of design one that needed improvement we reached the building stage. This was the final part of our project. Jaxon had drawn at least 10 different possible sketches since the time the project was released to us. But the final product was a disaster. As the due date drew nearer and nearer the builds became rushed. The first build was built entirely by Marcus but the second time around we all tried to build at once to speed things up. In the end we did implement the improvements and they did work. But it came at a cost of making the rest of our structure less so.

In the end I believe that our group worked very hard on this project. In the end our “Improved” Design was worse but through the way we all contributed equally to the project regardless of the outcome. I feel this was a good learning experience that my group members and I can take to future projects.

Statistics

Ayush Atre on

In this task Callum and I studied wellbeing in Year 9 students. We found this by collecting data. This data consisted of the amount of hours that Year 9 Students spent in an average week on wellbeing. Wellbeing consists of activities such as: Sport, Art, Music, Relaxing, Going outside etc. Any activity that makes you feel good. The purpose of wellbeing is to clear your mind and make you feel at peace.

This is a graph showing the hours that each series’ (People) have spent on wellbeing according to the survey

Since our data was in hours this was Numerical data. Although we could have also made a categorical data graph based on the types of wellbeing activities (Physical, Mental, Social).

Box Plot for the data.

Our data we received from the graph

Outliers: 999 and 50 

Mode: 0 

Median: 4

Mean: 30.41

Quartiles: 1 

Range: 21 

Interquartile range: 2

The outliers

The outliers that we found were 999 and 50. It is clear that 999 was someone making a “funny” reply. Although this might have been the saddest thing I have ever seen. This person should improve their sense of humor if they want to go anywhere in life.

Interesting bits of data

In the data we collected I noticed that Exactly 11 people chose 2, 4 and 7 hours of wellbeing. I found this interesting because its quite coincidence that exactly 11 people chose these.

Conclusion

In our data the mode was 0. This may seem quite peculiar. I believe this is because most of the students actually do not know what wellbeing activities include. Granted, the term “Wellbeing” is an umbrella term for a variety of different activities. Making it a very interesting statistic indeed. I believe that our data could be improved by adding a categorical section. This would make our data a lot more reliable.

StatisticsDownload