Remember those team projects back in your First Year Engineering Design Course? Chances are you had the opportunity to form your team, or randomly get assigned into one.
At the second meeting for The Game on October 2 in GB202, everyone was randomly assigned into teams. I figured that this was the team I would be working with for the entire competition. When the organizers said that this was a temporary team, I was suspecting another surprise in store. So far, I’m already excited.
The organizers then asked us to share with our teams our three core values and Twitter statements describing a “better world” that we came up with at the first session. I noticed that everyone in my group had different core values, but our Twitter statements focused on a common theme, which was to “create meaningful impact.”
Next, each team was asked to create a collage that illustrated a shared vision for a better world, tied with our core values, in 20 minutes. After spending 10 minutes discussing what to put in, my team began gluing words and pictures together. The end result was something spontaneously created with everything all over the place. It represented me well because many of the pictures and words resonated with personal experiences in my life.
The organizers asked us now to take a step back and look at all the other teams’ collages. All of a sudden, they said, “It’s time to officially form your teams for The Game.” I can’t believe it’s finally time!
What came next was surprising. We were asked to form teams by either staying with the people we were with, or by moving to another group by standing beside their collage. Now I fully understood why we examined all the collages. It was to see if my core values and vision were aligned with other teams. My group decided to split ways, after agreeing that there are other collages that represented us better than the one we made. We also barely knew each other, and we moved to teams with people that we knew.
All of the participants knew that The Game has a $5,000 prize at the end of the tunnel. I think some people chose to be in teams that appeared more driven to win that prize based on their collages. By observing the collages, each one attracted different people, and that can basically be attributed to each person’s core values and Twitter statements. I chose my team because I knew that I would work best with people that aspire for a common vision I believe in, guided with a diverse range of core values, which included commitment, diversity and equity. In addition, the collage I stood beside described a process of changing everything that is dangerous in society, and translating that into peace through cooperation and trust in humanity.
At the end of the session, the main challenge of The Game was revealed. Unlike typical engineering design challenges, this one was very vague, and it read: “Engineers leading change to build a better world. Your task is to design a project that will live up to this vision.” Everyone fell silent. How is my team going to achieve that task? I can’t wait to find out what’s next!
-Kevin Saludares