Throughout this capstone process, I learned a lot about Ben and a lot about myself, including the fact that we can work very well together. At the start, I was definitely pretty tired of doing what felt like busy work, but once we got into the swing of things it started to fly by. Bens idea really didn't click with me at first but at the end it all came together great. We definitely did a good job of splitting up the work and coming together at the end to do a good job on our project. When we didn't agree, we came together and heard each other out before discrediting their ideas. We did a pretty good job of time management but we learned how important it was. Because towards the end we definitely struggled with it a lot more than we did early in the project. Something that was really big for us was meeting the night before the project to iron out any kinks that we found in our presentation. Unfortunately at the end we had some time conflicts due to sports and were unable to do everything that we needed for our final prototype but we still had something that worked which was nice. I really enjoyed this project, and it helped me reinforce my want of being an engineer.
Ben's Reflection
I learned a lot throughout the capstone process. In the beginning, I was annoyed at having to do some many assignments because all I wanted to do was build a product. Towards the end of the project, I realized how important those assignments were. We used the survey results in our presentation, and we talked about the different problems and design we had to think of in part A and B. I also realized how important it is to have a partner that you get along with. Jack and I worked really well together, and we split up the work pretty evenly. It also makes it a lot easier to give constructive criticism or talk about things when we get in a disagreement. I think time management is really important; We did well on getting our assignments done in the early parts of the project, but at the end, I started to become stressed about due date. Jack and I even met up the night before the presentation to change some slides of the PowerPoint and to go over it again. We also didn’t have time to add a pocket for the silverware in our final design, but this was due to me missing one day of school due to sports. In hindsight, I’m not sure if we should have ever brought up our silverware pocket idea, and maybe we wouldn’t have been marked down for it. Overall, I really enjoyed this project because we had some much freedom in choosing our own ideas, and we worked on our own schedule.