Giving the Big Assignment

There's a lesson here I am having trouble learning myself: the upper level classes have difficulty getting through a big assignment.

The TD3 (previously Technical Design) class has a fairly storied history of washing out large, long term assignments.  It's too bad because some of these assignments are really interesting.  I think the first instance of this syndrome was the first time through the Mechanical Rainstorm project.  This is a full class, multiple stage project and two classes really had failed attempts before a third managed to finish.  There's just something about the working together and the interim deadlines that make the process unmanageable.

The second appearance of this type of result was the class effort at the 120 Volt project.  Again the class had a full class, multiple deadline project, and again they came out mostly with mush.  This time a grad student picked up the pieces and tackled the project one their own as a thesis.  That provided an even longer calendar footprint and eliminated all of the cooperative aspects of the thing.  But doing that also seemed to make what had been impossible more possible.

Interestingly these things don't always fail.  Each and every year the first year class manages to complete the Critical Path project.  As an intro level class the group is significantly larger.  Instead of four or five people working on the project there are more than 20.  I think the difference here is the hard, non-negotiable deadline with an audience.  But also, there isn't a research element to this project, just design/composition and execution.  The research part of the later projects are almost certainly part of the difficulty.

With the exception of the Mechanical Rainstorm I think the largest, longest footprint project the TD3 class  has finished would be the Cold Air Inflatable project.  That one had interim deadlines, research, and a small scale individual deadline in advance of the large scale, collaborative deliverable.  Even though this project did have a significant "figure it out" component, that component was fairly discreet.  Having an open ended deliverable also seems to be part of the problem.  Class that year was only three people.  I think the smaller team helped lead to a success.

This year's experiment was the Green Fabrication assignment:

Open deliverables, long footprint, research... this assignment has a lot of what tends to lead to assignments that fall apart.  It isn't over yet, but we've already had to punt a couple of times.  I've changed the deliverables and moved the goalpost.  There's still a chance we'll actually come out of it with something worthwhile, but it isn't going to be what I had hoped for.

The real disappointing part of this one is that legitimately in this case there might be very little to find.  So some of their difficulty might in this case be about the nature of the research as much as it is about the process of that research.  I do have a hope that like the 120 Volt project I'll be able to sell this to a grad student as a thesis somewhere down the line.  It'd be nice to have some answers on this topic.

In the meantime I need to do some evaluation regarding the future of the TD3 Big Assignment.  Figuring out what the successful assignments have had in common and applying that to future assignments would seem to be a worthwhile endeavor.