Criterion C - Demostrating thinking skills - Step 2

January 30 / 2017

Stage: c) taking action

Approaches to learning: Critical and creative thinking skills because I looked back to my process and got to identify problems I faced, the consequences to some of the choices I made and emitted judgements based on some of my actions.

Now that I finished writing my book (hence step 1), it is time to continue along with the criterion c steps in order to move along to the reflection stage, according to Lizbeth's blog (the personal project manager and my supervisor), step 2 of criterion c is answering and demonstrating the following questions in my blog:

Problems you encountered and how you critically and creatively solved these problems

The biggest problem I encountered during the process of developing my personal project was the theme change I had around september because the theme I used to have, no longer interested me, so I changed it to one I considered more interesting. It was a very big problem because I got behind in a lot of tasks I should have done a long time ago, I solved the big problem through working very hard during extra hours and trying my best in order to be able to catch up to the dates, my solution worked well for me because I was able to work efficiently and finish on time.

Another problem I encountered was the fact that during the process of writing the final explanations of the parts of the brain for my book, around 3 documents erased themselves or just failed to properly save for whatever reason. The way in which I solved it was the most annoying and not nice way to solve that kind of problems; I just wrote the erased explanations all over again, however I find that problems of that category help me build my perseverance and hard working skills.

Skills you have developed as you created your product/outcome

During the creation of my final book as I mentioned previously, I developed mostly perseverance skills because I continued to work hard no matter the obstacles nor the lack on inspiration when writing. Another skill I got to develop greatly was the transference skill because due to the complexity of my product, I was forced to learn and comprehend about the parts of the brain at a very high speed and then managed to explain what I had just learned in my book.

How your prior learning informed the creation of your product/outcome

The prior information I had regarding the brain was very limited, meaning it did not influence much because most of the things written in the book I learned almost right before I got to write about them, however, I did find very useful my planning process because I wrote small facts about specific parts of the brain, and those small facts, helped me as guidelines to what I should be writing in the final explanation.

How your knowledge and skills have grown throughout the creation of your product/outcome

My knowledge about the brain got to grow impressively because as I previously mentioned, I knew barely nothing, meaning I went from knowing nothing, to having a significantly high amount of knowledge regarding the parts of the brain and their functions.

My skills themselves grew in the way that I learned to face problems and stress in a different way, for example, before this whole project, whenever I felt stressed out, I would stop working and literarily lie in bed until I got over the stress, now, I face the stress to forcing myself to work because I just did not have any time at all to feel stress, so I learned to just get over it. 

How have you designed improvements

My process of designing improvements was based on a pattern, I would first finish doing whatever it was I was doing, then, after I got all the inspiration out of me I would read and check the work once or twice, and if I were to ring any errors, I would fix them immediately because then I would forget about them.