Cosmic Team

Let me introduce CERES — a team of four that is brought together by a school project which aims to tackle an issue of awareness about outer space and its possible future economic and social implications.

Never have I ever thought that this ‘Team Assignment” could turn into one of the most enjoyable team experiences in my life.

Thus I am asking myself, why is this team working so well?

First, type of motivation.

while reflecting on six months of work with my teammates I could not think of any conversation about the project as something ‘to get done’ for grades. This can be linked to the type of motivation we have towards this assignment. All of us are intrinsically motivated. There are two types of it:

1. Extrinsic — motivation arising from external factors, f.g. salary, threat of punishment, or, in our case, grades.
2. Intrinsic — motivation arising from internal factors, because of the sense of personal satisfaction and internal desire to accomplish the task.

Each of us is endlessly curious and always chasing for learning experiences. Thus, we take this project as something to learn from, not to get certain grades (which usually will be a consequence of such learning anyways). Having a chance to submit a paper, we chose a different path and moved from the idea of reforming the NASA’s Golden Record or creating an AI learning app to building Virtual Reality Product. We went beyond the school’ project requirements and chose to simply have fun while learning.

Second, complementing each other.

One example of such work could be a hackathon like the one we attended last weekend. The challenge was clear: build a VR learning game. Having different skills we managed to create a final product in less than 24 hours. While Jackie was compiling a list of objects needed for the game, I found and modified 3D objects. In parallel, Haitham was already setting up the environment and Jack ideating and writing our paper. We had fun and each of us focused on the skill they wanted to leverage or improve.

Ceres at SF hacks!

Third, investment into relationship

We all are social creatures and seek to have meaningful connections in this world. However, sometimes because of a huge workload and ambition we forget to stop and remember what is important to us. Do we spend invest enough into relationships with people we admire and enjoy spending time with? Meaningful connections are important and rare now, and in this team, I feel like everyone understands transience of this life and thus invest in what we value and enjoy the most.

The next step:

Next step for our team is to extend the game beyond the term of Minimal Viable Product (stay tuned for Jack’s story about that!) and, as always, have fun learning:)

Another unifying challenge for us as a team is to get Haitham into the picture and as you can see, we succeeded!

P.S.: read more about the product we built on the Hackathon here!