Critical Reflection on Module and Project Learning

 

As the module draws to a close, it is time to reflect on the valuable lessons I have learnt that I will bring where life takes me. I came to the module with a belief that thought organization is essential to understand others and be understood by others and I wanted to improve my thought organization. This belief was affirmed early in the module with the introduction of the PEEL and Paul Elder framework. Intellectual standards such as accuracy, clarity, and depth in the topic of discussion being applied to elements of reasoning to develop intellectual traits like confidence in reasoning and intellectual humility, certainly improve the quality of thinking and facilitating meaningful professional conversation. After knowing about the frameworks, I did notice their application in great Ted talks and keynote presentations like those of Tershing Tobgay and Steve Jobs. Another important thing that I learnt were the methods of writing academic literature and citing sources. The first application of these skills was the Readers Response, in which we had to read up on an engineer design or system and write an analysis on it. The system I chose was a power loom. Whilst reading up on the machine, I began to further appreciate the technology that made clothing affordable to this point and the traits of engineering literature. Avoidance of ambiguity, specifics marked with asterisks being explained separately and inclusion of relevant statistics in the appendix were characteristic of the sources I referred to. With our newfound knowledge and skills, we started getting ready for the final report and its presentation.

The product we chose to research on was a robot mop and I was tasked with finding out about the technical aspects of the existing system. After considerable analysis, we came up with 3 realistic improvements. My greatest struggle was in being convinced about the improvements as I was satisfied with the way the machine performed at that price point. Perhaps by incorporating these improvements, the machine would be rather expensive and would inhibit sales. But this is not to discount the efficacy of the proposed improvements. I worked on two of the improvement, namely the incorporation of omni directional wheels and the Laser SLAM (LSLAM) system over the current VSLAM system. For the presentation, I adopted a Less is More approach inspired by impactful keynotes by PR giants. I truly believe in it as I struggled to pay attention to presentations and did not want to subject my classmates to one. On a side note, as an audience member, it’s important to respect the presenter and try our best to pay attention to what they are saying. Some may be knowledgeable, but their presentation skills maybe not be the best and their presentation, less than engaging. However, we wouldn't want to lose out on that knowledge being shared. This, I would say, needs a fair amount of patience and discipline. 

To present my part of the presentation, I decided to use minimal visuals and had to learn how to animate the pictures. Finding pictures of how the robot mop would see the world through VSLAM and LSAM was rather challenging, but I did find something close which can be used. The structure of the presentation was derived from the report and ensure that the content was thorough. If I could have done something different, it would be to reduce the content but dwell longer in each subtopic and explain it in a more intuitive way. I realized this when our classmates asked a lot of questions at the end of our presentation. What was apparent to the member of my team was not clear to some classmates and we were much more well versed in our background knowledge than they were. The lesson learnt from the presentation was to consider all possible angles the of the audiences’ interpretation when coming up with the presentation.

In conclusion, this module has been instrumental in refining my thinking and communication skills through the knowledge and skills detailed here and I can only thank Professor Blackstone and my classmates who were constructive in every instance. I am sure to bring them wherever life takes me.