My journey to Mars through CBL
A refletion on my knowledge on the CBL framework, as well as my part in our last challenge for the Apple Developer Academy in Curitiba, Brazil
In the past weeks, I was faced with a new challenge, with a new group of people. This was my first real contact with the Challenge Based Learning methodology, my first contact with most people from my group, and, honestly, my first time ever thinking so much about Space. This topic totally terrifies me, which made the challenge, well… more challenging.
About CBL
Working the method in its normal schedule instead of Hackaton’s “rushed” style made me realize and learn quite a few things.
But first, what is Challenge Based Learning, afterall?
The way I see it, in a very summarized definition, Challenge Based Learning is a framework for developing projects, focusing not in the end product, but on the process of getting to it.
It is divided into three stages: Engage, Investigate and Act.
Engage
We get started with a theme, which in this case was Life in Mars, which leads us to a Big Idea. Thinking of the Engage process as a funnel to creation, the Big Idea is the wide concept in the top.
Then, come Essential Questions, which are open questions that can be asked about the big idea. This time, I've learned some keys to making good essential questions, such as not asking something that can easily be answered through Google or through a simple list and starting with How instead of Who, Which, How many/much, and so on.
Keeping this in mind, as when deciding the Big Idea, we brainstormed questions, discussed which one(s) everyone thought was interesting using methods as post-it voting (with addicional conversation to make sure every decision was unanimous). We then procceed to the Challenge.
I’d also had quite misunderstood what the Challenge is supposed to be. My mind pictured it as simply rephrazing our Essential Question into a sentence. Even though it is quite similar, it is a it more: it should be a call to action that can end in many different ways, being not too specific or narrow.
Our Engage ended with Space Travel as our Big Idea, How to travel to Mars? as Essential Question, and Make a pleasant trip to Mars possible as Challenge.
Between each stage we had small presentations for a critique process, which leads us to changing our challenge to Make the trip to Mars a positive experience.
This leads to something amazing about this framework: flexibility. Even though we are taught that, for instance, during a brainstorming session (which is often used when working with CBL) we should not be afraid of judgments, it’s quite hard (at least for me) to let go of the pressure I put on myself. Knowing that we are allowed to make mistakes and go back to correct them makes the whole process lighter; it makes it easier to let go, to just say/write/talk about whatever comes to mind. Still on this same topic, I realized how important this is not only to the flow, but also to the results: many of the ideas that we said in that let’s-laugh-about-this-silly-idea tone were not that silly afterwards.
Example? The pitstop on the Moon. My knowledge on this area is so limited I had to ask the rest of my group where the moon was. They not only skipped the judgment from my question, but also embraced my idea:
“Hey, since the Moon rotates around Earth, isn’t there a time where it gets between Earth and Mars? Couldn’t we make like.. a pitstop on the Moon?”
This seemed like the silliest thing ever. Ends up there was some actual research about it. Whether it’s a good idea or not is up for debate, but it ended up being not only a part of our project, but also one of the many inside jokes we laughed about countless times everytime we met.
By then, I realized one of the most interesting and important things I learned through this process: the importance on having everyone on board with everything. Making sure that every single person in the group was happy and comfortable with the choices being made was crucial, not only to our product itself, but also for our working environment.
Investigate
For this part, we create Guiding Questions about our challenge. It focuses on quantity. There are some ways to get there; in this case we brianstormed questions, then chose together the ones that felt more appropriate. Finally, we scored them from 1–5 according to their priority, and talked about which topics each one of us would be the most interested in doing research about.
Therefore, the need to be organized and communicative was emphasized. This was the part of the process I struggled the less with in terms of methodology, and also the one that made me realize how resourceful everyone (our amazing mentors included) was. As I’ve mentioned, thinking about the universe as a whole terrifies me: it’s too big, I feel too small; there is so little we know about it, and the more I think about how little we know about it, the more scared I get.
Luckily, the other people in my group did not share that huge fear, and we were able to divide our research into the areas we wanted to read about. I was very happy to do research on mental health, a topic I am very passionate about that ended up being quite helpful for what we came up with. Other people based their research on astronauts, others on spaceships, physics, and even information about tourism and cruiseships.
Act
In this part, my group got a bit "lost" in the beginning. We had gathered so much information, we had some ideas in mind, and we didn't exactly know what do to with it. At this point, we decided to call for help. We gathered methods from the presentation we had on this stage, added to the advice we got from another mentor, and defined our stakeholders, created our business model through a canvas, defined personas and value propositions, and defined customer experience/journey.
While this mentor was helping us find out way, I ended up finding out that some of things I was doing by heart were actually techniques people had done research about.
This gets me to another thing I found particularly interesting. Hearing nice things about our work is extremely motivating. My generation is generally strong on the Impostor Syndrome thing, and kinda weak on complimenting. We are living in a moment of realizing some things are nothing more than minimum. This is good to set standards, but sometimes I guess we forget the impact of kindness: we are way more likely to keep up with good behavior if we notice it makes a difference. Or at least I've realized I am. 🤷♀️
Team work
Talking about kindness, I could not write about this challenge without mentioning how amazing my group was. I believe we were put together for a reason, likely based on our personalities and working profiles, which worked very well. I am honestly sad that we are not working together anymore, because it was a perfect match.
At no moment I felt judged — I felt like everyone was doing their part on assisting each other with personal struggles. Every single person there was unique in their own way: some were calmer, some quieter, some more talkive, some laughed as much as I did on the silliest things ever. I usually feel embarrassed about laughing too hard on things that weren’t even that funny to begin with, but this particular person did the exact same thing.
Thank you so much Daniella Onishi, even though my jaw and stomach still kinda hurt from laughing so much. And thank you also Carol, Lucas and Neidi. You guys were proably the best group of people I've ever worked with, and the one I share the biggest amount of inside jokes with. 👨🌾 🛗
You are all so smart, talented, friendly and understanding that I can't help but smile thinking about the past weeks (even though I feel kinda drained at this point).
Besides the actual challenge, I was challenged to face one of the most negative aspects of myself. I am a control-freak, I admit it. Thus, I find it extremely hard to delegate. All my life I've been used to being the one in groups who feels the most comfortale with presenting, therefore ending up being the one talking the most, and also the one who makes slides and documents things; I am always terrified it might not get done if I trust someone else for the task.
Having said that, having no internet connection (except for my limited 4g) from Friday afternoon to Monday noon, and being in the middle of a mental breakdown, I was forced to participate less in the Act part of the process.
Everyone from my group was kind enough to make me feel comfortable about it, bringing up that I had done plenty through the other parts, but also including me in activities I was able to manage considering the situation. (A special shoutout to Bruno for calming me down multiple times this weekend, thank you so much ❤)
Talking about Bruno and the weekend, on Saturday we talked about the possibility of crossing our projects over, since they shared many similarities. Then, on Monday, while we were studying the best way to present our project, Neidivaldo came up with the idea of the "presenter from the future" act. He put on such a great act that I could not even consider the possibility of doing it. So, yes, I delegated. I also freaked out about it; our group was the last one to present (I always try to go first to get it over with), and while I waited I got so anxious I ate a whole bar of white chocolate. Not very healthy, I know (both the chocolate and the anxiety), but hey, at least I did it. And while it was happening and after it was done, I was very happy I'd done it. I loved how our presentation turned out. Lesson learned: I definitely wouldn't have it done better myself.
