Reflection on lab assignment

The past three classes I have been working with a group of people in our class in order to create a python script that could look at all the movies entered (in a dictionary) and find the revenue of that movie.

I believe that the point of this lab, group assignment is not just to test your python skills but also our collaborative capabilities. This is because looking back at it, we were put together in relatively big groups which meant we had to split up the work somehow that in the end everyone’s part was still compatible with each other. On top of that, not everybody was equally as knowledgeable about python because they didn’t go through the python tutorial. All this made it harder to find and easy solution but nevertheless we found one.

Unfortunately, there will always be the people who will give as much work as possible to other people so they won’t have to do anything. In that case we need a good ‘leader’ to organize who will do what and take responsibility for the final result. In most cases I would say that whoever knows the most about the subject, should be the group leader. However, that’s not always the case, when someone else is much better at organizing and just wants to take responsibility he can become the ‘leader’.

But what did we now actually learn by doing all of this ? Well, that’s not so easy to answer. I would say it most definitely help us prepare for our final project but even more importantly, it gave me an idea of how time consuming everything is. If I rationally think about how long it took us and then look at the amount of people in our group (5 including me) and then think about what would happen if it was just me and my final project partner, I can see some problems showing up when we would decide to do this project the week before it’s due. Now that I have realized this, I will talk to my partner, start making preparations, and make sure that we have all the data input and other tools by hand 4 weeks in advance.

To summarize briefly what I mentioned in this post, I’ll go over the important things once more. First of all, I mentioned that the lab, group assignment was mend to improve our collaborative as well as out python skills. Secondly, in order to work in a group effectively, we need someone who will organize and who will take responsibility for the final result. Finally, the last and maybe most important part, it’ll help us for our final project because it gave me a good idea of how time consuming this was. When we consider that writing the python code is only a part of the final project I know for sure now that we have to start early.