1) NB! Remember COMMUNICATE what you say...that means it is more important for the Judges to understand what youre saying than just rambling off your lines!
To do that you need to speak slowly and clearly and in a conversational manner. You also need to UNDERSTAND what youre saying.
2) NB! DO NOT FIDGET, AND LOOK AT THE JUDGE WHEN YOU ARE SPEAKING. The rest of the group must look at, and be interested in, what the speaker is saying.
3) Each time that you speak in the group where every members speaks about themselves or eachother you need to illustrate what you are saying with a little story.
4) Stand up straight
CHIRPYBOTS 2009 – TEAMWORK INTERVIEW
All:
Greet Judges enthusiastically
Emile:
Judges it is my pleasure to introduce you to the ....CHIRPYBOTS!
We will be taking you through our experience of the 2009 Smart move season.
Andrew will be talking about the tasks and areas each member was in charge of.
Andrew:
It is very important for a group not to end up doing the same work and not work against each other.
This way everyone knows what they are doing and everyone has contributed.
We divided what we and to do so that if anyone was sick or unavailable any day, during practice or the competition there was someone else who could happily fill their shoes.
Liam and Alex (raising hands) are the expert builders of our killer robot.
Timothy, Michael and Estee (raising hands) prepared the teamwork interview and did the basic research for our project.
Emile and I (raising hands) focused on programming while we all worked together with Mr. Buys writing the presentation.
We have two teams running the robot on the table with the best team doing the final round.
We all took part in the technical interview, the teamwork interview and our rocking presentation. But mostly Mr Buys made sure that we had FUN.
Michael:
Mr. Buys taught us the value of managing our time to make sure that everyone knew exactly when their jobs had to be complete.
This was especially true for linked jobs that depended on one person having completed their work so that the next person could carry on from there.
For example the builders needed to finish the robot so that the programmers can program the robot and the researchers need to get the basic research done before the presenters could write the presentation.
I can honestly say that we were never panicked about deadlines even though we did have to work hard at stages.
Niel:
We are very lucky to have a values program at our school where all the register teachers reward a value badge for the value of the month, to the person in class who deserves it most.
Shows the school values poster to the judges and talks about it.
As Estee received the values badge in her class for grace we chose her as the obvious choice to speak about gracious professionalism.
Estee:
Mr. Buys asked us to look up the words gracious and professional as it was one of the major things that you judges will look at to determine what would make up a good team.
Under gracious the dictionary describes words such as affable, congenial, and courteous.
Under professionalism we found proficient, skilled and specialized.
But after talking about it we realised that when you use the two words together it means that while we are very competitive we do not injure people with our words or actions.
That goes for our teammates, competing teams and judges.
We are hard on standards and soft on people.
I think it basically means that we have to respect eachother. I, for example respect Andrew:
For being fiercely competitive and continuing to work on the robot when everyone else said it was not necessary
(Estee point illustrates with little story)
Asks Judges: Can we give you some more examples?
Alex:
I respect Emile for changing the groups mood and making sure we are never too serious.
(Alex illustrates point with a little story)
Tim:
I respect Liam for continuing to build and rebuild the robot.
(Tim illustrates point with little story)
Michael:
I respect Timothy for never being down and making life interesting.
(Michael illustrates point with little story)
Emile:
I respect Estee for pulling a rabbit out of the hat when no one else could find one and baking a delicious cake.
(Emile illustrates point with a little story)
Andrew:
I respect Sean for being forever curious.
(Andrew illustrates point with a little story)
Niel:
I respect Michael for making sure we’re never illogical.
(Niel illustrates point with a little story.)
Sean:
I respect Alex for persevering and giving up camp to help us.
Estee:
We learned that we can use gracious professionalism everywhere and to be humble when you win and gracious when are beaten.
It makes us understand our parents better and we most notice it in successful people who get erespect and support from persons even though these people will gain nothing for themselves by doing it.
We also see it any place where there is competition such as sport.
We realized that everyone is just normal people who have feelings and weaknessesn and that to be successful one has to work around those weaknesses:
Alex:
I was too independant, but I had to change because I worked in a structured team.
Timothy:
I guess you could say I had bad karma but I soon discovered that with a positive attidude I could just get more from everybody else
Emile:
I loved to overcomplicate things but I very quickly realised that it was better to keep things simple because if you make things complicated you just confuse people.
Estee:
I am a bit of a stress queen but I soon had to stop because I learnt that I could trust may teammates and that there was no time to stress.
Andrew:
I was a bit rigid and didn’t want to try new things before I completed one whole thing before starting another. I realized that it is okay to stop halfway with something and start with a new idea, especially if it shows promise.
Sean:
I didn’t take anything serious , which was soon fixed since we had many tight deadlines.
Michael:
I guess you think I asked too many questions? I soon realised that it was not that hard to figure out things from the manual and thinking about it.
Liam:
I was way too quiet! Which did not reeeeally work because I had too come out of my shell to act in the presentation and interviews.
Andrew:
Moving on to the problem and solution for the research project.We actually only settled on the final idea after the regional competition where we still had three solutions that we thought were all equally good. But we realize that it counted against us in the presentation because we might have confused the judges.
We live in an area where three major highways converge within 5 km of our school. Allthough, if I now think about it, the biggest transportation problem that our community has is traffic congestion we took a while before we settled on what we would like to try to research and solve.
That is the N1, The N14 and the R21. On top of that we, Irene are allways on the traffic report due to the bottleneck taht gets created at the railwaybridge on Nellmapius road. Not really the claim to fame one would like to have.
We eventually decided to tackle to the problem of traffic congestion after many strategy meetings where we discussed many ideas and possible sollutions. Once we decided we could see the problem literally everywhere and everyday as parent became frustrated due to endless traffic queues that made us late for school or when we had to leave waaaaay before an appointment just because we could not reliably say that we would arrive on time if we left any later.
Sean:
We realise now that the big picture is to reduce traffic as it affects us, our parents, our teachers in short everybody’s
emotional state
job security
physical safety
family time
free time and the country’s productivity.
Together we made decisions after hearing everyone’s ideas.
We trusted each other to do what was required as there was actually no time to nitpick and shoot down peoples ideas. We had a good and clear vision of whatr we wanted to do and went ahead and really tried to look at something that could solve a very complex issue.
We all attended meetings and practices and if one of us was absent they took the intitiative to catch up what they had missed.
We eagerly helped each other when there was a problem so that no one would feel excluded.
We worked together as a team, had fun as a team and enjoyed the competition.
We all learnt a lot at FLL and realised closely science, math, IT and technology are linked with Robotics and how much fun it can really be.
We gained so many new skills:
(each member illustrates what he/she means by the following statements to site an example)
Tim:
I learnt to listen to my group members
Sean:
I learnt to concentrate
Andrew:
I learnt programming and perseverance
Liam:
I learnt to share my opinion and I learnt time management.
Emile:
I learnt patience
Michael:
I learnt teamwork and found that teamwork isn’t actually that bad
Alex:
I learnt to use others ideas when in a team
Estee:
I learnt to think rationally and work with different personalities
Emile:
Judges were more than happy to answer any other questions you may have and when youre finished may we sing you our team song?
No comments:
Post a Comment