Coaching Questions Group 12
To help your group and the teachers prepare for the tutor meetings, we would like you to answer a few questions in between sessions. The following paragraphs list the questions for each of the weeks, please write you answers directly underneath the questions.
After the kick-off - Week 1
- What are you expecting to learn during the Robots course?
We expect to learn to take initiative, to work efficiently as a team, to give useful feedback to each other.
- What kind of coaching do you expect?
We expect passive coaching, where the coaches will only help us when we ask them to. Furthermore, we expect that they will answer our specific questions without them pushing us in a particular direction.
- What kind of coaching would you prefer?
We prefer the coaches to give constructive feedback on our ideas and extend them with their vision and opinion.
- What will the coaches expect of you?
They will expect from us to behave actively in the team, show initiative, be motivated, show creativity and come up with innovative ideas.
After the first tutor meeting - Week 2
- What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?
We needed to be more detailed in what we wanted to do. Although we understood that we still needed more details, we were really expected to be very specific in what we want to do, and do our research in that area. Also, the coaching meeting motivated us to contact TU Delft, since they gave us the confidence that they probably would cooperate with us on this project.
- How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?
We immediately contacted the research group at TU Delft. Unfortunately, we are yet to receive any meaningful communication back.
- What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
See above point. We learned that establishing communication is difficult. Furthermore, since we still are not fully sure on what we can do, we are a bit behind with regards to other activities.
- What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?
We tried to determine what we wanted to do, but because of communication troubles which were out of our control, we did not achieve much else. However, we have made a backup-plan in case Delft does not reply (in time). We will present this during the next meeting.
After the second tutor meeting - Week 3
- What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?
That we tried the best we could to contact TU Delft, while that didn't work we were on a good way to develop the backup plan, which was a good idea.
- How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?
We stopped with trying to lay contact with TU Delft and we focussed on our backup plan.
- What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
Thomas contacted KNGF, from this we learned that the dogs don't know themselves where they are going and that they don't have a place in mind where they need to go, but their owners do. So the main function of the dog is to make sure that the visually impaired gets safely to their destination. We had a meeting with Tech United and we discussed our plan for the project and discussed the possibilities. Next tuesday we have a second meeting, in which we will show the algorithm for determining if the robot stays in it's restricted area and if it needs to give resistance to the user.
- What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?
Specifications.
After the third tutor meeting - Week 4
- What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?
That we as a group know what we want to accomplish in the project and we know well how to do this, but we didn't show that in our Wiki and that needed a lot of progress.
- How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?
We needed to visualise our planning and the choices that we made and the reasons behind the choices in the Wiki. So we worked on the Wiki and we transformed it so it is fitting for the current plan.
- What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
We had a new meeting with Tech United, to test the current C code for determining the resistance of the robot.
- What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?
The wiki and further planning.
After the fourth tutor meeting - Week 5
- What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?
That we needed to individualize the wiki and the project more and we needed to explain our code.
- How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?
We wrote a pseudo code with explanations about what we are actually doing in the program and thought about how we could individualize the project.
- What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
We fixed issues in the code, individualized the wiki and thought about what we could adjust in the project, we created the handle, wrote an explanation of the code and had a second testing meeting with Tech United.
- What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?
We made videos during the testing session and elaborated the previous parts on the wiki to give more insight in our project.
After the fifth tutor meeting - Week 6
- What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?
We need to incorporate some more features into the code for our robot. For instance, in the video we showed the coaches you could see that the robot almost drove over Thomas's toes, which can be very dangerous. When we noticed this during the testing session, we all didn't think much about it, but we should definitely incorporate some features to make the robot more safe and we should take the users experience more into account the coming week. Furthermore, we should address the limitations of our project more and elaborate them.
- How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?
We added some features in the code, for instance that the robot will give more resistance when it moves backwards. Furthermore, we thought about what limitations the robot and the project has.
- What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
Last meeting with Tech United, creating demo videos, preparing presentation and finalize code.
- What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?
The presentation, final code and a demo.
After the final presentation - Week 7
- What are the major steps of the project? Please list
Coming up with an idea, Research the idea, Contact the appropriate persons, Execute idea, Testing and improving, Finalize the project.
- What is the most important thing you learned in this project? (e.g .about design or working in groups, etc)
To be more realistic when starting a project and that with a specific project and agreement between the groupmembers, you can come a long way. Our first idea was to build an entire guiding robot ourselves, however we quickly realised that this way way too difficult in the time span that we had and with our expertise.
- What do you wish you had spent more time on or done differently?
That we started immediatly with Tech United, we would have come further with the project then we did now, because we only started this specific project with the collaboration with Tech United in approximately week 3. If we would have done research on Tech United immediatly, we might have had the time to implement a lot more features.
- What was the most enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why
Testing the robot, because we could actually see what we accomplished and how well it works.
- What was the least enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why
Starting in a good manner, because we first wanted to contact TU Delft, however this didn't work out. So we had some issues starting up the project.