Workshop 01 Review

Workshop 1 Review

I took part in a Workshop involving creating a flowchart of a proposed solution on how the traffic lights in an intersection work. We did this in groups of three, and were presented with the first task which was describing in words how the traffic lights work.

My group and I were generally confused about this; as none of us drive and hadn't ever really thought about it in such detail before. We went back and forth discussing the potential sequence of the traffic lights- which lights would change from green to red, red to green, which car would go first and in which direction etc. We jotted down some very messy notes about our discussions in an effort to make some sort of sense of it.

After a few minutes we were presented with task 2- creating a flowchart showing the sequence for our solution of the problem. At this point, to further improve our understanding of the problem, we drew out a mini diagram of the intersection and began to label the potential directions the cars could go in. Using the example flowchart for reference, we began to jot out our proposed solution for the traffic lights.

I generally was a bit lost at the start of this workshop as I had never really thought of something seemingly so simple in such an in depth manner, but as me and my group discussed the problem at hand things started to become clearer and clearer.

I enjoyed the delivery of this workshop; I felt that breaking it down into multiple sections with different tasks made it less overwhelming and gave us time to get our heads around the initial confusion. Discussing it in plain english first and then moving on to the flowchart was very helpful in my thought process. I really enjoyed the interactivity of the workshop as hearing other peoples thoughts and interpretations on the workshop aided my understanding and gave me a new perspective on thinking. I also feel that group work is very beneficial as in a lot of jobs you are working with other people; so doing lots of group work helps us learn and prepare for our future professions. 

I feel that writing out my thoughts of this workshop is better than keeping it stored in my head; this way I can share my thoughts with others and not bury it in the back of my brain, so writing it into a blog will also be good to look back on and to reflect on in the future.

Drawing of Intersection

Source: Self

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