7. Advice for course staff
Overlapping puzzles with project
One of the problems encountered with this project was the incredibly slow startup process. This was probably largely due inertia, a.k.a "laziness", but was also partly due to the fact that after the final project had begun two of the largest, most time consuming, and lowest graded puzzles were assigned. This overlapping of puzzles with the project caused initial effort on the final project to lag. In retrospect if we had been able to make better use of these initial couple weeks more time could have been allocated to the integration procedure, which was, instead, rushed. Again, these issues may draw on bad time management, however overlapping the last two puzzles with the project only added to the problems of time allocation.
Load balancing
Requiring each team to be comprised of exactly two members may not have been the most appropriate distribution of resources. As the project progressed it became apparent that certain teams were required to stick to a more aggressive and more time consuming work schedule in order to reach, or in certain cases almost reach their goals. It is possible that those teams which appeared to require more team members may not have properly budget their time, or perhaps did not define their approach as efficiently as possible. However, if this is the case it still does not seem appropriate that certain teams would have been required to work as efficiently as possible, and meet their deadlines, while other teams did not need to be as aware of time use, or work efficiency, yet were able to produce working components. This apparently unbalanced distribution of work responsibility may have been counteracted if team membership was not restricted to two. One approach would be that the initial distribution of team members be set differently, some teams having 2, or 3 members, and maybe some having only 1 member. Another approach would be to require that the management team distribute team members, however all memberships must be finalized before a certain date.