Challenge One — Life on Mars 👽

In the last two weeks, we’ve worked on our first challenge (or was it the third one?) with the purpose of improving our knowledge about Challenge Based Learning, Apple’s framework.

This time the challenge was a little bit different: our solution could not be an App. At first, I was a little afraid of not knowing how to develop a non-digital solution because Apps normally are part of my comfort zone. During the process, I realized that my fears weren’t invincible giants because I had two great allies by my side: my team, and Challenge Based Learning framework. In the end, I really liked our solution, Portuguese speakers can check out a little about it here.

Apart from that, let's talk now about how was the process…

Challenge Based Learning Framework

Fun fact: aliens developed space travel technology using CBL 🛸

On Saturday night I found myself explaining by heart how CBL works to my friends and that was the moment I realized that during the development of this challenge I've really learned CBL's workflow and how to use it (or at least feel confident enough to explain the basics of it).

I think that there are two main reasons for this: this time we had a lot more time to work on each phase of the framework, and we had the opportunity to talk and ask questions about each of these phases during the Critis.

I could easily say that the main thing I've learned with this challenge is that CBL is totally mutable… Ok, I already knew that because it's been said to us since the application's hackathon, but this time I could feel it for real because the final result I was expecting at the beginning of the process was different from the one I was expecting at the middle and this one was also different from what we've delivered at the end.

Of course that there were more things I’ve learned, and here are some of them:

• Right at the beginning, my team had a problem differing the Essential Question from the Guiding Questions. It was really helpful when Maicris told us to think about the framework as an inverted pyramid, i.e., as we advance on the process our actions/thoughts are supposed to get more and more specific.
• Continuing on the past topic: essential questions are motivational questions, and you shouldn't be able to solve them with a fast search on _____ (put here your favorite search engine). This is what really makes them different from guiding questions.
• There is no problem with asking difficult questions, don’t be afraid of doing so. The reason for this is simple, just like I said before: the process is mutable, if you find yourself at a dead-end caused by a difficult/impossible task you can turn back and restart from a more strategic and better position.
• During the engage phase, one of our mentors said (I think it was Gonzatto) that questionnaires are a great tool to find new things and not just to validate what we already think. For some reason, it really stuck in my mind, not sure why but I think it’s because it takes me away from a position I’ve always taken of just trying to validate my ideas.
• Last but definitely not least: the value proposition canvas worked for me more as a solutions organizer than a helper to create solutions (probably because we had a solution idea since the engage phase). I’m not sure if this is how it was supposed to be, therefore I still can’t feel confident enough to use it without help…

Now that we've talked about CBL, I think that is the moment for me to evaluate my participation on the team.

Team work

Looking at the big picture I think that our team worked well together, we didn’t have dead-locks on which was the best path to follow on each phase of the process, and as I said before, I liked our final delivery.

Making a reflection about my actions on this topic I could say that most of the time I did a good job, mainly when we were preparing our statement and pitch because it really felt good to find the best way of saying something in order to promote our product. It was an opportunity to realize that I might like the business area more than I thought.

There were also some moments when I felt a little lost about what our team should be doing and I didn't communicate it directly to the team. That's certainly a point to improve because I feel that in these moments I wasn't able to give my best.

Aaand… I think that's it for this reflection.

I'd like to thank all mentors, you were really great every time we called for help. ❤️