Written by Sifan, 2021 Cohort
Both challenging and warm hearted. This is my strongest impression of the cannery project simulation. However, I believe that this experience will be remembered fondly.
Our project suggested a simulated solution for a cannery museum in Vancouver, that can utilize digital media to solve the problem of fewer iGen visitors. Although I have some experience writing proposals and project speeches, I have never created an English proposal and presentation for my own games. At first, I was apprehensive about this team project. But, thankfully, I have a team with fantastic communication— team Roots.
Under Aida’s direction, everyone promptly and smoothly selected the part of the project for which we wished to be accountable. Everyone has done their part to the best of their abilities and has been discussing and improving through numerous video conferences. This is something I didn’t expect, because I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how horrible team projects are, on social media.
Our achievements today cannot be separated from the different skills and great cooperation of our Roots team members. Octavia’s animation experience helped us to have the best storyboard; Tao’s game background helped us provide a lot of ideas; Ruby’s rich experience in teamwork was a great help to our project; and Oscar has been guiding the team members work. Listen silently, integrate all the information, and make corrections in time when the team loses focus. Of course, in order
to respond to them, I also tried my best to: solve the market and business-related parts with our marketing stage; organize the format and design of the proposal of the team with my experience in graphic design and past planning; and use my rich video production experience to design and make the presentation video so as to achieve the best results for our project.
By the way, although I mentioned “numerous video conferences,” the number of meetings was not too high. Every meeting was necessary and efficient. This allowed everyone to spend more time on the project itself, and not hold meetings for the sake of holding meetings. This is also one of the most feared parts of my past work experience.
We not only had a clear division of work but also helped each other. When Aida said that former students like pre-MDM more than MDM because it “feels like a family”, I deeply agree with that. One thing I really want to share is that, near the end of the project, I needed a screen shot video of our prototype for the presentation video. Our team lead was assigned to polish our prototype. At that moment, he hadn’t finished it. He encountered some problems he couldn’t fix. But he didn’t say anything about that before the last meeting. When I inquired about it later, he apologized to us and said he would solve it as soon as possible. Nobody blamed him. And everyone said, “Hey, don’t worry, we are a team. Let’s fix it together now. ” At that time, I was greatly moved. I really do think this team is like a family.
In a word, I gained a lot. I used to think that teamwork might be less efficient than working alone because it would waste more time on team communication and cooperation. But this cooperation made me realize the efficiency and importance of teamwork. I sincerely thank our director
Larry Bafia, our teacher Aida, our TAs, Simran, Iris and the whole Roots team for bringing me such an important and wonderful experience.