Other times they might be looking for something a little more technical.
In particular, looking for
how your personal contribution lead to the flourishing of the groups work in general.
For example, when I talked about the problem that I worked on as part of
the Course III development, when we were developing that map application.
I only told you about a very small piece that was my contribution to a specific
part of that project.
But in fact, this was a much larger project that involved the work of myself
and two of my students who were helping me out.
So we had to work together in a team.
So as you probably remember, this was a mapping application where we wanted to
pull down real world data from the internet, and then distill that
data in a way that the learners can work with it, using these graph algorithms.
And then display all of that data in this nice front end.
And if you haven't taken our third course,
I really encourage you to go check out that project.
It's really cool.
But this involved dividing up the work between myself and the students.
So, I was in charge of the project as the faculty member in charge.
So the way I divided the task was that I was going to focus on
the pieces of the code and the project that were closer to the learners,
that the learners had to work with.
And my students Adam and Alec could focus on pulling the data,
so the back end getting the data into the system, and
then displaying the data through this nice front end that they developed.
But of course, there were interfaces between these pieces.
So, we needed to establish the interfaces where I would know what data to expect and
what data they could give me and in what format, and
then what data I needed to provide to them.
So early on in the project, very early on we established these interface boundaries
and this allowed us to develop our own pieces independent of each other
while being confident that at the end of the day they could all fit together.
Now interfaces are never seamless, so open communication and
regular meetings are also key.
We would meet at least once a week to hash out the technical details of
each of our parts.
And make that those interfaces were still fit in together
the way we expected them to fit together.
And, do this process of open communication, repeated work,
and very early focus on the way our pieces were going to fit together,
we were able to create a really, good, successful product.
And all in all, this work experience was fantastic.
I had a lot of fun working on this team, because we all shared in this very
same goal of getting this product up and running.
And we work productively through these interfaces in these open communication
channels.
We all respected each other's work, and
that helped contribute to the general positive overall approach of the team.