My Week Schedule

This is the schedule of my life from Friday, April 27th until Thursday, May 3rd. This is also a typical week in the life of Emma except other weeks I have soccer practice (out of school) and not as many school soccer games, I am also in class on Friday in a typical week. The activities on the weekend aren't
always the same but take up about the same amount of time.

Usually we don't get Drama, English or Phys. Ed. homework. If by chance we do I still have time for them, that's what would go in the FREE TIME areas. 

This activity has made me realize that my life seems busy but I don't regret a single
half hour of it!

DEATH BRIDGE!

Unfortunately I was away.

BUT

I observed the other groups while they frantically built, rebuilt, revised and tested. In the end everyone failed the competition. Not by a bit but by a lot. I'm not saying that I think I would do any better but this is what I saw that led to failure.

1. The lack of "research"
   By this I mean that it didn't seem like any of the groups really explored all aspects of the game. All the robots that came up to test were quite heavy for the flimsy bridge and that added to the overall failure around the bridge area. It seemed like groups didn't grasp the full idea of the competition and forgot to plan for certain variables.
   
2. Unplanned testing time 
   Many groups did this but I'm just going to pick on one group in particular. While Sylvie and Jeremiah were fixing the robot I noticed that their project manager was just wandering around, sometimes even helping other teams. Instead of wasting time Mohamed could have been practicing throwing, which ended up to be a big issue for many groups. If you can't get the rocket in the robot, you can't win.
   
3. Irresponsible testing habits ( Evan, Cian, Prasad: Evan drove their robot of the table during testing time.) The whole point in testing time is to find the flaws in your design and fix them. At the same time you're becoming familiar with the way your robot works. Testing time is NOT to be used for doing crazy stunts with your robot. Evan, Cian and Prasad's group was a perfect example of what not to do. They were the first group to bring their robot to the table and it actually looked pretty good! They worked on driving the robot then Evan drove their robot off the table. Of course the robot fell to pieces. Not only that but their sensor also broke so they could not compete in the challenge. This was accident was irresponsible and preventable if they had stayed focused and not gotten foolish. Unfortunately that meant there are now only 3 working sensors.
   
4. Giving into failing
   A lot of groups were very unprepared for this challenge. Lots of people also just gave up because they knew that their robot was never going to win. They just gave in. Although it may have seemed like a hopeless situation I think that they could have kept trying to adjust their robot and entered in the second or third competition.

Negotiations Card Challenge, REMATCH!

The challenge was exactly the same as last class except you could only cash in three sets at a time, so as to not clog up the line as part of your strategy. To refresh your memory: each group started with $15 million to bid on cards and negotiate. Different card combinations gave you a different amount of money and the goal was to have as much money as possible by the end of class. This time I worked with Chelsea.

What started us off in the right direction?
When looking at the decks we tried to rank them from most desirable to least. Right of the bat Chelsea and I bought one deck, which we thought was pretty good, for $7 million. Unfortunately we must have made a mistake because we looked through the cards and there weren't to many of them and didn't have a lot of the same suit. After that, most of the decks sold for higher than we could afford. The last deck though was of great interest to everyone except they only had $7 million left so we ended up topping their bids with $8 million. This was a good move because it gave us a really big deck that was way better than expected.

What was your best trade? How did the Negotiation lessons help?
Our best trade was with Evan. We were looking for a King of diamonds to complete a same set suit. We were fair with the deal and did a one card for one card deal. We knew and communicated to him what we wanted, we knew our limit (which was two cards and a value of $1 million) we knew his motivation (he told us it was for a four of a kind and showed us the cards), and we created an honest, good relationship. Our first bid was the bid we settled on so we didn't have to remake our bid. Although the deal didn't gain us many cards it was the quality of the cards that counted. We could have asked for more, and might have gotten it, but it was important that Evan felt like he was getting a deal because it was our first trade with him and wanted many more fair trades to come. We used what we learned in class about being direct and helping to come to a compromise, if needed, to make both parties feel good about the trade.

What was your worst trade? How could it be improved?
We only did five trades in total and our worst was again, with Evan. The time was running out and we only needed the four of clubs to complete a set that would make us $10 million dollars. I guess we were sort of rushed and didn't really pay attention about what we were giving away, we just wanted that card. We ended up giving Evan a 2 and 3 of diamonds. Not only did we give him more cards for less, they were also in numerical order and the same suit which increases their value. It wasn't a huge mistake but if we had made more trades we may have made more trades such as these which would have not helped our financial state at all.
We could have improved this deal by taking a breath and calming down. If we weren't as frantic to cash things in I think this deal would have gone better. We could have asked for another card to make it a 2 for 2 deal, not offered two cards and stood our ground on the one card deal or asked for money to accompany the card to make up for the quantity difference.

Did we win?
YES WE DID! In the end we had $140 million dollars, beating out Nobu and Griffin's group by $1 million dollars.
Thanks to a last minute deal with Trevor we went from having $80 million (still a really good sum of money, we would have ended as second place) to almost doubling our total. Trevor wanted our 2 of diamonds and was willing to pay $60 million for it. Although this was the most profitable deal for us I wouldn't classify it as the best because he approached us with the deal and we were caught unaware and didn't know what we wanted, what we could offer and what his motives were. After the transaction, approved done by Mr.Kee, it turned out Trevor gave us the money just so that Nobu's team wouldn't win. Although that suited me just fine because that would mean we won, I knew it wouldn't happen in a real world situation.
Aside from that bizarre deal, Chelsea and I were successful and won because we bought two decks to start and had enough time to sort out our cards. We knew the value of our cards, what we had and what we needed. Since we had so many cards to start with, we didn't need to rely on trading and got to know our cards better. Chelsea is an introvert so ended up doing most of the sorting of cards and I made most of the trades. It was definitely an improvement from the last challenge. Without the bizarre, last minute deal (which was completely legal in game rules) we ended up with $80 million, $43 million more than last time. Our official total though was $140 million which was $103 million more than last time.

It was a huge success!

Negotiations Card Challenge

We started with 15M and had to bid for different decks of cards and then negotiate to get the best combinations and cash them in to get more money. I was partners with Noshin who's personality type is INFJ. We lost the challenge because we didn't have the most money. 

We didn't know the value of our cards which led us to some bad trades. We were also not very organized and we had to constantly go back and check our pile of cards before finalizing a deal which not only wasted time but also gave the opposition more time to think about the deal and whether or not it was the best for them. It also looked very unprofessional and made it seem like we didn't know what we were doing, which was not true. 

I mostly did the negotiations and Noshin sorted out all our cards and told me which ones we needed. We were both good at knowing what we wanted and knowing our limits on how much we could offer. There were many deals that fell through because other groups thought that they could convince us to pay more but we stood our ground and walked away to let them know when we say "final offer" we mean it. This helped us later on and people took us a little more seriously. We also kept a close watch on the time and cashed in all of our cards before the time limit. Some groups didn't cash them in before the bell and lost a lot of potential profit. 

Next time I would alter our strategy so that we took a little more time figuring out the value of our cards and organizing them. I would also make deals for cards with money because everyone was trading card for card and didn't know the dollar value of what they were trading. Overall it was a fun challenge and I learned a lot about negotiating.

• • 
    

Auction Hunters

For this blog I watched an episode of Auction Hunters called "Battle Bought" and looked at the different negotiation strategies used.

1. What were they trying to sell to who?
They were selling battle bot's to Chuck and Jason who are two aerospace engineers.

2. What were the opening bids for both sides? How did they come to an agreement?
Chuck and Jason started with $2,000 and that price was agreed upon under the condition that it worked perfectly. The battle bot didn't work perfectly so Chuck and Jason dropped it to $1,800. Ton and Allen counter offered by including all of the controllers plus the big battle bot for $2,500. In the end they compromised and decided on a price of $2,000.


3. Name 3 things you read off of observing body language during negotiations.
Jason's hands in a strained position indicated that he was still very interested but wanted to get a better deal.

Chuck was leaning a little bit away from Allen and avoiding eye contact suggesting he was trying to hide something. Perhaps he knew the robot was worth a bit more and wanted to keep that a secret. 

4. Identify any negotiation strategies used.
Alan and Ton used small talk to get the buyers to feel a little more comfortable. When they feel more comfortable they might give more things away with their body language. Another thing they did was a little sweet talking. "Wow I'm feeling humbled" said Allen after they talked about Chuck and Jason's work. When the deal was in danger of dropping in value they bartered and threw in some extra robot controllers and parts to bring the price up. This worked pretty well because they sold the buyers things they didn't originally want and thus raised the price of the deal.

5. In your opinion, who got the best out of this negotiation?
I think that Allen and Ton got the best deal out of this negotiation because although they didn't know the value of the product as much as the buyers but they used their superior negotiating skills to sell the product on their terms. I noticed that in they had an initial offer of $2,000 and that's what they ended up with in the end. Although at one point they could have walked away with selling only one item for a fairly good price they sold off the rest in order to squeeze the last few hundred out of the buyers. They also made a positive relationship with the buyer's which leaves room for further deals later on.

Tips for Negotiations

What you should do:

• know what you want
• know what others want
• know the value of what you have
• don't show uncertainty
• be friendly to others, firm but not pushy

What you should try not to do:

• wait for others to approach you with a deal
• look for things that are in high demand
• let others look through all your wares. Offer them something and don't let on how many pieces you have that they might want
• try not to make rush decisions, they often lead to bad decisions.
• let others know what you need. Once they know that they can manipulate you and you'll end up with a bad deal

Tanks

Group:Evan
           Gregor (team leader)
           Emma (parts collector)

1.Our team lost this challenge. Our tank was very un-tank-like and was not able to take a hit. The way the battery pack was supported wasn't that great and I personally think we had an excessive amount of gears and it didn't seem to help the overall performance. Our big problem was the securing of the wheels, gears and the battery pack.

2. We were all extroverts so we made sure that our ideas got heard, that's for sure. Even with that though we seemed to get along really well and had a very good work atmosphere. Gregor was the main builder because of his previous experience with Lego but also because he just picked up the materials and started doing stuff. Evan was also building. I was the one that asked questions because I didn't understand the plan of the robot. That lead us to conversations like this, "Oh yeah we have a great gear system. Emma what did you say about supporting the battery pack? Oh I forgot all about that. Let's figure it out now." All in all we worked great as a team until the testing part. Gregor did the most driving and sometimes didn't let Evan and I test it out.

3. Our team did best at allotting time for testing and emergency modifications. We finished building twenty minutes before the end time so had a solid 15 minutes to test. It was great because we all got to have fun driving without the pressure of competing. Our robot did really really well at first but then things went downhill from there. The gears started breaking off, the connection to the battery pack weakened... it was a mess but thankfully we had 5 minutes to fix things.

4. Next time I think we should spend more time on the brainstorming and putting together ideas part. We did share ideas but then we didn't really put them all together at the beginning. People just started building and worried about the rest of the design later. The questions I asked during the building time were good but should have come up in our brainstorming session. I think that thinking about Anti-winning would have really helped because our robot wasn't like a tank. We should have focused on stability and strength rather than speed. Tanks don't usually go fast but they are really strong. Ours was the exact opposite, very fragile and quick. I would have changed the design so that it had a way to defend itself against opponents.