Two words strike absolute terror into the hearts of students everywhere: group projects.
Audible sighs arise from classrooms and lecture halls around the world when teachers and professors utter those fatal words. It does not matter if you are a first grader or a graduate student, working with other people seems to be a daunting task. Why?
Because people (can) suck.
One of the goals of the ETC’s curriculum is to instill both hard skills and soft skills in its graduates that make them suck less and much more enjoyable to work with (put plainly). A major mechanism in this aim is the famed “Building Virtual Worlds” course developed by Randy Pausch [Disclaimer: especially if you read my first post, Professor Pausch is going to come up a lot and if you have not read The Last Lecture, you should stop reading this blog and go read that instead because he is much more interesting and clever and engaging than I am]. In “BVW” as it is (not-so) affectionately called around here, students are assigned to the role of artist (me *laughs*), programmer or sound designer, and then assigned to five person teams comprised of all three of those roles. Teams then have two weeks to build a virtual world for an assigned platform.
Sounds simple enough, right?
For the first round, all of the teams were prompted to design worlds (games, experiences, whatever your creative heart desires) that enable an immersed guest to help “Character A” overcome a fear of “Character B” and achieve a goal.
I could spend many words going through my (incredible) team’s design and development process that eventually produced “Scaredy Cat”: a virtual reality experience using the HTC VIVE that allows a guest to play with, feed and eventually befriend an alley cat that is afraid of humans after being abandoned. I could do that (and I will do that in a portfolio update that will be happening soon - but if you just can’t wait, there is a video at the bottom of the page), but I am not going to do that here.
What I will talk about, though, is the crux of Round 1: fear. More than just for this project, being scared and worried and the like have been consistent themes around this first month of graduate school.
“I’ve never lived on my own before”. “I don’t know if I’m good enough or smart enough to be here”. “I’m afraid they’re going to rip our project apart at reviews”.
All of these overheard fears may seem disparate and unconnected at first, but listening to people elaborate on them starts to illuminate a thread that ties them all together and sums up, probably, my biggest takeaway from these first few weeks of work… asking questions.
Asking questions, like group projects, has a negative classroom stigma that starts early on in education and pervades throughout its lifetime. Raising your hand in class or admitting you don’t know something can be scary feelings, but they should not have to be. You are in school to learn, right? And you can only learn by getting questions answered, right?
Part of the question asking fear, I think, can be attributed to an inferiority complex some people have that flares up when they have a question, but do not see any other hands shoot up so they assume they must be the dumb one that does not understand (this is when all of my teacher friends would chime in with the adage “If you have a question, other students probably have the same one”) The other part of the question asking fear, one that I think is overlooked, is a simple lack of awareness. Most people don’t know what they don’t know. And when other people know those things that they don’t know, that scares them.
Who did Randy Pausch say would have made a great graduate student? (If you cannot answer this, I’d be slightly disappointed and tell you to, again, put this down and re-read The Last Lecture) William Shatner. Pausch said that Shatner visited a Star Trek set and asked questions because he was a “man who knew what he didn’t know, was perfectly willing to admit it and didn’t want to leave until he understood it” and Pausch called that “heroic”.
A few days into the first round, one of my classmates walked by my desk and watched me struggle through some introductory Maya modeling and animations of my virtual cat. I likely looked frustrated and fed up because he tapped on the shoulder and asked if he could show me something. I figured it could not hurt, so I spun away from the desk and he proceeded to show me some tricks of the trade he had learned over the past few years. I grabbed the mouse back from him and things started to make more sense and I excitedly thanked him for making my life easier and he thanked me for letting him share what he knew.
People want to be heroes. People (can) suck, sure, but if you give them a chance to be a hero, they can do that too. After that interaction with a guy who has become my go-to for animation questions, I realized that everyone in the program had their own unique skill-sets and areas of expertise that I have access to whenever I get stuck. Not only were those resources there, they wanted to be used. People love to talk about their work and teach people about what they are excited about. The right question to the right person can make a lot of fears wash away.
So, while I could talk about the hard, technical skills I learned over the first few weeks and the deliverables that were produced, overcoming fear by asking questions is what really struck me as a lasting impact moving forward. Whether it would be asking someone how to do laundry correctly or how to program a waterfall in C++ or what they really think of your game’s prototype, questions make people vulnerable; however, those who answer questions respect the asker’s willingness to be vulnerable and learn for their own betterment and, usually, do whatever they can to help.
And that’s why group projects should not inspire fear in students. Group projects concentrate multiple areas of expertise in one place and should act as a hotbed for question asking and knowledge gaining. That’s what I’ll be taking forward. I want to know what I don’t know, admit it and not leave until I understand. It may take more time and make some people uncomfortable, but what’s the worst that could happen?