Tennis Ball Game

The challenge of this game was to have everybody touch the ball as quickly as possible. At the beginning, that was the only criterea. Later in the game though, we added more criterea and consraints. After the first game, only one person could touch it at a time. After that, we had to be arms length apart. The last constraint was having to have our eyes closed.

For the first and second rounds of the game, my team did a kind of funnel with our hands. The only difference was we only used one hand for each person during the second round. For the round where we had to be arms length away, we tossed the ball to every other person, which worked out because we had an odd number of people. The last round we had to have our eyes closed. We had one person in the middle and spuna round touching everyone's hands.

We lost the first round, because our funnel took to long. During the second round the funnel idea worked, because we only used one hand per person and it really cut down on the time it took for the ball to touch every person. The third round we took to long and lost, so our idea didnt really work out. The last round was really close, but we lost. we lost by like a second.

If we did this again, I'd use the funnel idea a lot more, because it was really effective. It would work for almost evry round except for the eyes closed one. For the eyes closed round I'd do the same thing but put a faster person in the middle.

If we did this again I'd probably revise our strategy during the arms length apart round. It took really long and didnt work very well.

Survival at Sea Game

In this activity we were given a list of fifteen items and rank them according to how important they would be in a survival situation. I said that the water and the army rations would be the most important because the are extremely important in survival and you cant live long without them. I put the can of shark repellent as the bottom choice because it cannot really help you with survival or rescue. The transistor radio was hard to place because a radio is a good thing to have, but you can only listen on a transistor radio, so it loses much of its use.

My team agreed that food and water should be the top two priorities for the same reasons. In addition to that, the team also put shark repellent as the very last item. One thing that my team and I ranked very differently was a sextant. I put it as the fourth highest, but my team ranked it tenth highest. A sextant is virtually useless without star charts, and i didn't think about that when i ranked it so i agreed with my team on it. Our group worked together by voting for things, and exchanging ideas.

A lot of the expert rankings were very different from what the whole class thought. They put the shaving mirror as number one on the list. Their list was more in favor of being rescued than surviving though, and most of the class was thinking of survival more. They ranked shark repellent far higher than my team did. Also they ranked the chocolate bars near the middle, and my team ranked them very near the bottom. I think the expert rankings were based on being rescued, and my teams ranking were based on survival, so we cant really compare them.