Critical Path 2020

For more than a decade now I have had a staple project in my first year class.  Since the Production Planning class came into being there has been a critical path project and that project survived the transition into Basic PTM and then another transition back into Production Planning.  I use the subject of critical path as a vector to bring in this project where the students have to build and troubleshoot a fairly large Rube Goldberg machine.  The project has become a right of passage for year after year of classes and has also become a tradition within the Design Production community of our program every spring.

Each year I push up against my own feelings about whether I should be assigning the work.  The critical path dimension to the thing is a fairly frail fig leaf.  Although that is the basis, and the final product is a concrete example of a critical path, in truth the students don't learn much about critical path in completing the assignment.  Part of the original motivation for creating the assignment was to come up with something that could not possibly be achieved successfully if left until the last minute.  Historically my class has gotten less attention than some of the other classes the group is taking in this semester and so my assignments often appear to be getting short shrift from the students.  The nature of this project makes it so that it has to be done over a long period of time in order for it to work.  Students ignore it at their peril - and because it is a group project, one student ignores it at the group's peril making it aggressively self correcting.  Over the years this has become less of an issue.  The nature of the thing has percolated through the DP culture and the group has become fairly conscientious about getting a good start.

The other thing it has going for it is the collaboration and teamwork dimension inherent in the project structure.  This is the first true group project this population does in any class, and it sort of sets the tone for many things that follow.  All other things aside this dimension has value.  This year I actually added in some instruction and some process steps designed to emphasize the quality of the group interaction and to maybe even try to teach them something about collaboration on top of just setting them to the task.  I went to our teaching center and brought in some collaboration educators to help.  There was actually too much to do in the time frame I had and I wound up deferring some conflict resolution content until next spring.

That's the history, here are the current events.  In the middle of this year's project we got the shelter in place orders and CMU moved all the classes online.  My class had 3 weeks into the project and were on Spring Break with 2 weeks of work to go after they were return.  Most groups had gotten through their planning and had done a lot of materials scavenging and purchasing.  Some of the groups had started some fabrication and troubleshooting.  At that point we had the possibility of completing the assignment as assigned taken away.  There was just no way to do a collaborative build when the 26 students are spread across nearly as many states (and a couple of countries).  The deliverable had to change.

I had the thought that we could still preserve the event nature of the thing.  I could change the requirements such that each person's last step had to initiate some kind of electronic signal: email, text, phone call and that the next person's first step had to trigger by the receipt of that signal.  Then class could still meet on the due date for a group presentation in real time and they could still have their amalgamated machine.  I dropped this idea for a couple of reasons.  First, the atmosphere of real time problem solving we have in the room for the presentation is chaotic and really depends on them having the support of their classmates.  Having the device hitch up in someone's garage with them working on their own and knowing everyone else is waiting for them to resolve a problem on their own in real time just seemed like too heavy a load.  Second, I became concerned that without the resources available on campus: tools, materials, advisers, and their classmates the whole nature of the craft of the project might no longer be achievable.  We needed something to smooth over that rough spot.

In the end I proposed to the class that we abandon the majority of the group nature of the thing and that each person in their home should have to build a slightly larger machine: 5 steps each instead of 3.  The thought was that in losing the integration we were making it easier and so we would offset that by making each person's contribution larger.  I'd extend the due date some and each student would commit a working trial of their machine to video for submission and then on the due date we would watch all the videos.  I also told them I would have a grad assistant cut all the videos together so they would still have a class artifact at the end of the project.  In order to offset my second concern above I also opened up the definition of "machine" in the context of the assignment telling them that if they though that the making of the thing was going to be too far outside their skillset that they could do an alternate mode.  I suggested that they could do an animation or some kind of puppetry or perhaps some motion storyboard.  In our discussion I left the interpretation of what this meant open and told them that if they had something in mind they were unsure of that they should bring it to me for discussion.

On the whole this was received better than I had anticipated.  I should say that at the point at which I proposed it to the class I was still ready to just chuck the whole thing and chalk it up to unfortunate times.  Had they not had so many hours in already I might have leaned that way from the beginning.  But with the amount of effort they had already put in at the time the circumstances changed just taking what we had to date and calling it done felt less than.  Their biggest objection was losing the group nature of the thing as the planning together of the design and the execution had been a large part of the work they had already done.  In the end they suggested that rather than 5 steps each that they should do four, but that one of the four, the first step, should have to be a recreation of the last step of the prior student - thereby maintaining continuity of the whole thing and providing a small opportunity to collaborate with another student.  That sounded fine with me and we proceeded along those lines.

It turns out that we'd missed a few details in the tweaking of the assignment and one or two of the original dimensions of the assignment dropped out.  I didn't mind that too much.  My biggest concern was that being in an environment where everyone was working alone that some number of them would miss the due date.  That outcome would be very difficult to gloss over with the nature of the day of class I was planning.  There was also something nagging at me about the depth of effort that each student would apply.  With everything developing in the room in front of each other this is largely self-leveling.  With them not seeing their work as it came together I thought some might do way more work than others.  In the end that was just a chance I had to leave to them.

In the end pretty much everyone elected to do actual machines.  We did get a couple of animations and one paper craft puppet show.  Everyone made the due date.  I though everything was appropriate and that the work all in all was great.  We had class today and watched all the videos and a student in the class offered to cut everything together for extra credit and had it done in time to show at the end of the same session.  We didn't get the huge roar from the class the first time the machine completed, and we didn't get a burst of applause from an audience when they saw the thing come together and work, but we did have a fun class where they got to enjoy each other's work and bring a large project to completion - even if it was a different completion.

See for yourself: