Reflection - Problem #1

1. I have really learned a lot working on our problem these past few weeks. I would even go as far as to say that I've learned just as much about working on projects and teamwork as I have about the Roman Colosseum. I've learned dividing a project into parts is a fairly good way to go about solving a problem, but that communication is essential if this approach is taken. As for the Colosseum, it's impossible to write down everything that I've learned so far. There were a lot of things that I knew about the Colosseum before this project, but this assignment really allowed me to connect all of these ideas. I was able to find out how and why things were. For example, I had heard that the Colosseum had a retractable roof, but I never knew how it worked, or at least how it might have worked; that was one thing I learned during my research. One of the most surprising things I learned about the Colosseum, however, was the seating system. I was surprised to find out that the Romans would hand out tickets for each event. The audience would be given clay tablets known as tessera which would have the seat, row, and section number on it. What really got me was how similar that idea was to our method of seating today. The only major difference was that today we use paper tickets instead of clay.

2. After we were given the assignment, we first stated brainstorming. We wrote down all of our ideas on post-it notes which we then organized on a C-Map, which I'll post below. We made sure to be as open-minded as possible because there is no such thing as a bad idea. Once we organized all of our ideas we started to weed through them. This was really the hard part because there were so many sides to the Colosseum that we wanted to talk about, it was very difficult to decided what was better. Eventually, we were able to consolidate all of our thoughts into three main categories: history, entertainment, and construction. We felt these were the most important things when talking about the Colosseum. We also thought the arch was very significant in the Colosseum so we made sure to highlight that in our presentation. After we found our main ideas, each one of us chose a topic to research. I was responsible for researching the arch and relating it to Colosseum. The first two classes after we divided the research, we simply discussed all of the things that we had come across and traded sources to aid in our research. As the presentation date drew closer, we each created a part of a PowerPoint slideshow with our own topic. We then put all of our pieces together to make our final presentation.

3. Working in a group really helped out with the research. There was truly an overwhelming amount of information on the Colosseum, it would really be difficult for one person to digest it all. Another benefit of working with a team was that we were able to "cover more ground" so to say on the internet. We were able to search more sites between all of us and so we were able to find some really good sources.

4. I thought that the overall project made for an interesting experience. It was a different way to run a class and it was nice to have a change. However, I wouldn't say it went perfectly. Our presentation could have been a bit better. I think that, because there was so much information on our topic and so little time to present, we missed a lot of important things that, given more time, we would have been able to cover. There were just so many interesting facets to the Colosseum. Another unfortunate part of our presentation was that it ended up being more of a lecture rather than an "interactive presentation to stimulate interest". In that respect we did not do so great. I think that it was mostly due to some confusion over the problem. I was conflicted between wanting to relay a lot of the great information I found to the audience and fulfilling the requirements of the problem. Initially when I found at that the class was problem-based I thought, "Oh, okay, we're going to create presentations to teach each other about Ancient Rome." Because of this initial thought I had a preconceived idea of what we were supposed to do. I think this may have interfered with our final presentation and caused it to be more of a lecture. But after seeing all of the presentations, it seems like we were supposed to present of an idea of how we would "stimulate interest". I think we were supposed to give a presentation on what we would do. Some other groups did this in their presentations and I think that theirs were far more enthralling than ours, but I thought this method also presented a problem: by concentrating on what they would do, I felt that we as the audience missed out on a lot of information. I know that I learned way more during my research than I was ever able to present and I'm sure the same goes for all of the other groups. Overall, I thought this project was a great experience. I really learned a lot of things that I hope to be able to apply to our second problem.