Reflection

At the start of the module, my goal was to learn how to speak confidently in front of crowds, whether large or small. I believe I’ve made small progress after 13 weeks of critical thinking, but there’s definitely still room for improvement. During the oral presentation, I messed up my script due to stage fright and made a mistake. However, I was glad that I was still able to deliver the key points to my audience. With that being said, it’s clear that I wasn’t able to fully accomplish the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the module. However, I hope to overcome this issue as I continue my journey at SIT. 

Throughout the 13 weeks of Critical Thinking, I was tasked with researching two topics: the Bambu Lab A1 Mini and a bio-based material called hempcrete. Between the two topics, I was more interested in hempcrete, which led me to conduct more in-depth research on the material. Initially, I researched hempcrete using ChatGPT, but I wasn’t able to fully understand the explanation as I don’t learn well through text. Therefore, I turned to YouTube to watch videos on how hempcrete is made. After watching a short video, I was able to understand much more compared to reading text. This made me realize that I learn better through videos than through reading.

While researching hempcrete, my group was required to create a technical report to present all our findings. I was tasked with researching traditional materials currently in use and explaining how hempcrete could be a better alternative. After completing my research, I gained a lot of insightful knowledge. However, I struggled to fully express my key findings in the report due to my poor writing skills. That was when I turned to ChatGPT for help, and I did my best to refer to it while expressing all my key findings in the report. Through this process, I learned that poor writing skills can prevent me from effectively communicating my findings to others, which could negatively impact both myself and my team. Therefore, this made me realize that I need to put in more effort to improve my grammar and sentence structure in order to communicate more effectively. 

Another thing I learned from this module is that my group is quite introverted, so we preferred meeting online rather than in person. However, this significantly reduced the efficiency of our progress. Despite that, we still had to get the work done and meet our deadline, which forced us to step out of our comfort zones and communicate more effectively. We scheduled specific dates and times to meet up and divided the work among ourselves to ensure we could submit the assignment on time. Through this module, my perspective on learning has changed, as I realized that stepping out of your comfort zone isn’t always a bad thing. Afterall in life, we need to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable.