Reflections on working collaboratively with Team Flower

We're about halfway through our course now, and tonight, we are officially done with Alice.  For the past two weeks, I've worked collaboratively with Team Flower - that's Sam and Ben - on our Alice World, "He can call me flower if he wants to" based on the movie Bambi.  This project was harder than I thought it was going to be.  It was more fun than I thought it would be, too.  I also learned where I fit in a team.  My role, as always, is stage manager.  I work best when I can herd, coordinate, fit the widgets in the boxes, set up meetings, brainstorming sessions, take notes and minutes, outline a project, and then move everyone through it.  This comes naturally to me.  My siblings used to say that the my little sister was the bossy one, but come to think of it, quiet as I was as a kid, I boss people around pretty well.  That doesn't sound nice.  And I'm not mean or bitchy bossy - just have a vision of what it all should be, and like to set the route.

So that's what I did for Team Flower, small as that role was.  Though I enjoyed working in Alice in the programming, Sam really seemed to take off with it - she has a knack for taking vision and putting it into the program.  Ben was our Big Thinker.  Our Visionary.  He wanted this to be the Alice Project of the century.  Unfortunately, the second week he was sick, so many of his big plans had to be scrapped in favor of practical concerns.  My overall concern was story - that it had a beginning, a middle, and an end that made sense.  So Sam and I agreed that the simpler the concept and the story flow, the better.  We were able to get creative with the characters and dialogue, and the dialogue, crazy as it is, does flow naturally.

And here's what's cool.  Tuesday night, we had an online meeting on Wikispaces, and we were DONE in a half hour - it worked.  And even cooler - presenting with the four other teams tonight was really fun.  It was neat to see how the other teams worked.  I feel like it brought our class together.

The astronaut gazes off in the direction of the Wizard

This snapshot makes me laugh because our story was just so silly.  And it was such a challenge making the bunny and the horse move together.  Sam did a great job.  But the idea for the bunny on the horse was Ben's.  Great work, Team Flower!