About me
Hi guys!!!!This is Sailesh so Ragu Raj here. I am currently studying in Singapore Polytechnic and my course is Chemical engineering. I love outdoors and I am an outgoing person. I also love to wear tank-tops, like the one you see in the picture above.
From this module, I hope that I will learn to express my feelings and emotions after doing more blogging and reflect more on my thought processes and my planning and my organisation of information in my blog. I also hope to become a more hands-on person and also be more daring to carry out tasks by myself. I will also want to have fun, as well as to learn extensively in this module.
This is my group!!!! I am now going to introduce my awesome team members.Since you already know me, I am going to introduce my awesome team members. The one in a black shirt is Reinard. He is like the leader of the group and often leads the group in doing several tasks. Beside Reinard, is Wayne. He is the most lovable one in the group and also has an extremely creative mind.
For a group to function with the utmost productivity, splitting up of roles among the group members equally, is a must. This ensures equal participation of group members and also ensures that no group member feels left out or cornered by other group members.
But hey, before that, our group also needs some ground rules to lay as a foundation before conducting activities together.
Ground rules
1) Respect all group members and ideas presented by group members
2) Show up on time and come prepared
3)Attack the problem, not the person
4)Participate with an open mind
5)Always show up to group discussions , unless there is an extremely valid reason.
And here are the roles and responsibilities of our group members
Roles and Responsibilities
Chemical product
You might be wondering what my group members and I are going to do together as a team. Well, the suspense is over. My group is going to create a chemical product!!!
Well, you guys might be pondering and cracking your head on what a chemical product is. Well, let me explain to you what a chemical product is.
Any product that is designed or manufactured using chemical engineering principals can be defined as a chemical product. Creating a chemical product is definitely not an easy feat as a lot of planning and thinking has to be put into creating a chemical product. We came up with a chemical product design, which helped us to design and develop the chemical product.
However, we also had to think about the chemical engineering principals applied in the design of the chemical product. Some of the examples included fluid flow, mechanical processes and thermodynamics. There were 4 categories of chemical product such as commodities, molecular products, micro- structured products and chemical devices. In this module, the focus was on chemical devices.
Chemical devices are miniature processes which accomplish a particular chemical transformation, while being convenient and effective to the users.
Pain points
I had to identify the pain point that the user faces, which causes the user to abandon their current product and drift to my product.If you guys are wondering what pain points are, pain points are specific problems experienced by the user while using a product or a service.They come in lots of different shapes and sizes and it is very important to identify and remedify these pain points as effectively as possible. For example, older version of phones had a lot of buttons and manipulating the phones would be an extremely difficult task to do. Pressing the buttons more than one time for a single letter would take a lot of time. This might extremely irritate the user, especially in times of emergency. However, phones nowadays have touch screen interaction, as well as very less buttons. It also has enhanced technology , making the phone capable of doing so many things, in a shorter period of time. Older versions of phones also had very less security as personal information stored in the phone could be easily hacked. However, new phones have top notch security protection against viruses as well as hackers.
First, we had to brainstorm about problems that were being faced by people in society. We had a lot of ideas,but most of them were unrealistic. They involved major world issues and we had gone out of topic. We cracked our heads as we were thinking of a chemical product to use. We wanted to solve problems that many people face in their households. Not only should this chemical device eliminate the problem, it should also ensure the comfortability of the users. After a while,Reinard suggested an idea, a diffuser. Well, there are many types of diffuser, and we did not know which type of diffuser to use as a chemical device. After thinking, I reminisced about my secondary school days, especially those days when I spent a long time in school and came back to my lovely room with an unpleasant body odour. My body odour quickly fills up the room, causing the whole room to smell bad. Moreover, some of my shirts that were being hung in my closet also smelled bad due to containment of air in the closet. When I opened the closet, the smell to which I was welcomed to, was not definitely the warmest welcome. Well, I guess you guys can also relate to me. Even many sprays of perfume or deodorant could not overpower the foul smell. We wanted to manipulate the diffuser in situations ,especially during times when the user was not using it. We also wanted the diffuser to be smaller , so as to not occupy too much space.
Tuckman's Team Formation Model
I agree that the tuckmans team formation model is one of the most effective team formation model that I have used. After implementing this strategy in my group , my group members have been able to work well with each other. This is due to the fact that this model shows the various stages of a group,step by step,which relates to situations faced by the group members of a group. The first stage, forming, shows that the people in the group are treated like strangers. For example, I had only worked with Reinard in a few projects and I have not really communicated with him before. Thus, there was an awkward silence during the starting of the group activity. However, as we began to share ideas for ground rules, we were more vocal. However, the conversation was still a bit awkward as the responses was often regarding ourselves. This was the second stage of tuckmans team formation model, storming. As soon as we began to share more ideas, we began to feel more comfortable. For example, when I first shared my ideas for a ground rule, I was hesistant to contribute my idea, as I was afraid that I would be judged by my other group members. However, as my group members started sharing ideas, I automatically started sharing their ideas and their thoughts. I started feeling less awkward my group. When my group members acknowledged some of my ideas, I felt like I belonged in the group . As we shared ideas about the chemical device, I had made sure to listen to every of my team members opinion as I had run out of ideas at that time and more ideas could help us to achieve our chemical device. Moreover, my other team members had awesome ideas. This was the third stage of the tuckmans team formation model, also known as norming. When we assigned roles and responsibilities to each other , we had made sure that our roles and responsibilities were equal and that no one had more or less work to do than the other group members. For example, each one of us took up one role.This was the fourth stage of the tuckmans team formation model. As for now, my team is working towards the fifth stage of the tuckmans teaam formation model, also known as adjourning. I had applied some of this tuckmans team formation model in several modules, such as CP5201,CP5202 and other modules However, as I have not been introduced to the tuckmans team formation model before this module, I had only applied some stages on my team. This tuckmans team formation model was extremely helpful and effective.
Importance of Literature Review
When we created this diffuser, we needed to make sure that this diffuser was actually effective and credible. Therefore, we did literature reviews, which greatly assisted us in the creation of a diffuser. This literature review is a survey of literature such as books, articles,write ups , and other sources that help you address the important issues and concepts relevant to our research area. In our case, the research area is a perfume diffuser. These literature reviews critically analyses the information gathered by identifying gaps in current knowledge , by showing limitations of theories and points of view,and by also formulating areas for further research and reviewing areas of controversy. There are many reasons why these literature reviews are significant. Firstly, when I searched for a perfume diffuser, there were tremendous amounts of search results, and I taken a lot of time to search for the right article as most of the results were not related to the specific type of perfume diffuser that we had wanted to create. Secondly, I had to make sure that the articles that I chose were written by experts that had many years of experience in the field. I had to make sure these articles are credible, so that my group members and I could rely on the information in the article. Thirdly, reading through several articles relating to the topic of research is a must, as there are cases when researches may discover new angles or research gaps that needs further exploration by what has already been written on a topic. Fourthly, literature reviews help steer clear of inadvertent plagiarism. Lastly, these literature reviews protects ourselves against charges or plagiarism and also saves our time, effort and resources. Literature review has definitely helped me as I had definitely wondered about how I was going to find the right source that was related to my topic of research, just by searching about the topic of research on the internet. Well, I had also applied this literature reviews in previous modules and it had worked extremely well as it helped me to narrow my research .
Now , I am going to share my experience about my first practical.
Reflection on reverse engineering
Before attending the first practical , I was extremely terrified , as the topic of the practical that was going to be conducted was a topic that I was totally unfamiliar with. Many of my group members had drank coffee and had experience of operating a coffee machine. However, I had never operated a coffee machine before in my life. Despite putting in effort to watch several youtube videos, I still could not figure out on how to operate a coffee machine, as many different videos had different ways of operating a coffee machine. We had first removed the detachable component of the coffee machine. We observed two openings in the filter holder of the coffee machine. One opening was at the top side of the filter holder whereas the other is a spring- controlled opening at the bottom of the filter holder. There was also an opening in the jug lid of the coffee machine. Then we tilted over the coffee machine and unscrewed 4 screws. We struggled to remove the screws as we were not experienced with removing screws. After a long time of continuous trying and switching of coffee machine to each of the group members, we had finally managed to unscrew the screws of the coffee maker. By dismantling the coffee maker, we had learnt a lot , as we had to figure the functions of the coffee maker parts by ourselves. Moreover, we had also experimnted on the products and linked back to our learning based on previous modules, such as CP5201 and CP5090. While having fun, I also learned about the coffee maker. Moreover, by doing it maunally, I had an enhanced understanding of operating a coffee maker rather than just reading about the working mechanism in a website. Reverse engineering also helped me to easily remember the working mechanism of a coffee maker.
