The Toils of Inventories

Jonathan, Jenny, and I removed ourselves from the class Zoom and entered our own, separate Zoom room. I was the only one whose name didn’t start with the letter “J,” but I tried not to let my nerves show.

“Make me a makerspace for under $3,000,” our professor had said just moments before.

The prompt echoed in my mind. We scanned each other’s faces, each looking for a sign, a signal, where to begin. A second passed, and then– action!

Jonathan created a GoogleDoc where we could share our ideas. We first brainstormed about different things that we could have in our makers space. We all went on separate shopping trips throughout the internet to find different things with different prices. Jonathan and I thought about who we could serve by creating the space with student organizations. I thought of the story of what our imaginary university, Franciscan University would be. Jenny was a pro at spreadsheets and kept track of all of the details. She let us know how much money we had left to spend. We developed an outline of what needed to be done. Everyone did a great job shopping around to find great deals.

We accomplished developing our goals and then assigned people different parts.

There was a lot of emailing back and forth. I decided it might be helpful to have a brainstorming document in our Google Folder so that we could share information through a document which was right next to our work instead of in an email thread where it is easy for ideas to get lost or disconnected from the work that is being done.

I had a busy week and by the time I had gotten to sit down to work on Monday, I was surprised when I went back into the document and found that most of the work had been done. I had been planning on looking up the prices of some items because we all were going to work on that. The following week, I adjusted and made sure that I finished my part earlier so that my group knew I had it taken care of.

I think our group worked well together because we accomplished everything we set out to do. We accomplished a lot when we were together in our meeting. Everyone got along very well. I think we all did a good job of listening to each other and helping each other develop ideas.

I think that I could have done better at getting my work in earlier so that there would have been more for me to do. I also tried to send my group my contact information through chat in Zoom and accidentally sent it to everyone in our Tech course. Good mistake to make here and not during some professional conference, but somewhat embarrassing nonetheless.

Peer Assessment: 5/5

Self Assessment: 3.5/5