In the beginning of this project we were given a small Tupperware full of screws and other pieces of hardware used in construction that were supposed to represent fossils or living things. Then from the patterns and design of each of the pieces of hardware we were told to arrange the pieces into groups that we felt were most alike and how they were related to each other and what branched off of what. After about 4 or 5 of these arrangements we settled on the one bellow. After we arranged our cladogram we then came up with the names for each of the groups and the story of how each of the evolutionary changes occurred.
Reflection
Well this project was a mess to say the least. This is do to a number of reasons the first was that I was absent for the first few days meaning that I had to jump into the project with almost no in-depth detail on what we were doing and why we were do it. The second was that my group and were very confused about the project and why we were doing the project. Because of this we had little to no moral going in and running through the project causing a number of problems like repeated side tracking and other thing of the like. However there was some lesson that can be learned from the process as a whole. one example is that I cannot do everything on my own no mater how hard I try. This is a very important lesson that U learned through out this project as even though I was one of the few people who worked consistently on my project there was no way I would have bean able to finish it all on my own with out the help of my group do to both time and skill set restraints. This can be seen with the actual cladogram itself as I basically did 99% of the work on it when it came to arranging it because I was one of the few people in my group who knew how to cladogram, but I still had no idea what to do for the story as such things are not my strong suit. I also learned the importance of proper team management. Because I tried to to take on so much of the project by myself the majority of the project was forced to be rested on me meaning that everything was based off of my incomprehensible hand writing which only worked to farther confusion in everyone. I also found things that I did well on during this project as well of example I greatly improved on my ability to herd group mates back to working on the project. This came into a big effect toward the dead line where I managed to get all my group mates to work on the project together to quickly get the project done. This project also helped me improve my own work ethic as an individual allowing me to work harder and longer on things. This was a consistent improvement throughout the entire project as I only ever had one I can't work moment during the entire project while the rest on it I spent working away to get it done. Overall the project was a good learning experience for me as it showed definite areas where I needed to improve and other areas where I had improved.