Laidlaw LiA Reflection Week 5: The Last Stretch

This week has probably been the most hectic and stressful week of this LiA program. Going off from where we left off last week, we started this week slightly behind schedule, especially for some students who were still quite behind schedule in their prototype progress, be it in the 3D modelling aspect, or the lack of components due to delivery delays or difficult in acquiring a few components.

Thus, this week we focused a lot on catching up with these students and making sure that everyone is on track to finish their prototype. However, as we have learned these past few weeks, things don’t always go as planned, more often than not, some mishaps happen, leading to more challenges along the way. Surely enough, it happened this week too, after helping and guiding the students’ design finalizations and revisions, we planned to start 3D printing the models at the start of the week. Unfortunately, there were a lot of technical issues in the 3D printing process, leading to the inability to produce the 3D-printed parts.

This issue led to a very hectic week. Essentially, as this issue was not the fault of the students, we as instructors had to do everything we could to actualize and assemble the students’ prototype designs. Thus, this week was filled with back-and-forth visits to the local household appliance stores to find makeshift components similar to the students’ 3D designs to still be able to assemble a functioning prototype. 

This truly was not an easy task, even with the 3 of us leading this program’s instruction. As one person went to get these components the other two would be busy either remastering the circuits and the programming aspect of the prototype, while another would be occupied either consulting the students about the makeshift design and possible revisions to simplify them or trying our best to assemble a part of whichever students’ design which seems feasible enough at the moment using the limited components that already has arrived. 

Another challenge we faced in this whole ordeal was having limited freedom in using power tools in the vicinity of our teaching space, be it due to safety concerns or just the lack of some tools’ accessibility. This made the assembly part almost exclusively done by the scholars with very limited involvement with the students. This was a shame for both the scholars and the students as on one side we were in critical need of manpower to finish assembling the prototypes as we were being stretched too thin at some point of this week, while its a shame for the students as they could not be more involved in the assembly process.

At the end of this week, we kind of managed to get everyone caught up, with at least half progress done on most of our students, hopefully, we can finish everything else in the last 2 working days next week. It’s going to be tough, but also fun so I am glad there’s something to look forward to. I am also glad that upon reflection we learnt a lot of things this past week, mainly regarding time management, critical thinking, and problem-solving, mainly through figuring out how we can still finish the prototypes among the scholars and the students. I am truly eager to see how everything will end up next week.