Group Activities

This exercise was one of the most fun and most interesting groups excursive that the class has done yet. I would never imagine that some of my fellow classmates that seem so quiet and to themselves can change so much when competition is involved. The atmosphere of the whole class was very tense. People were very loud and it seemed that everybody that were involved in a group were giving their inputs on how they think that their idea would work as opposed to another member of their group in order to get the supplies they needed. I also saw that when a group got the supplies that they needed, they rushed to go what they had to do with that particular supply and then help on the supply and didn't let it go until they got a good offer from another group. I noticed a lot of intergroup conflict, especially between our group (grp #2) and group #3. For an example, when the group members needed something from us, they would try to negotiate and try to get what they needed. But when our group needed one of their supplies, the group just ignored our requests and pretended like they didn't hear us. We noticed that group 1 cheated. Since they needed a ruler to measure their paper, they used the ruler that was in their 5- Star notebook. Although group 3 ignored us, we still had a strategy to keep all the supplies that we had from group 1 since they were almost done. Without our knowledge, group 4 was giving group 1 all of our supplies, which helped them win.

The only strategy that our group tried was negotiating. Unlike the other groups, we didn't want to cheat to win; although it was thought about. We were offering trading supplies that we didn't need with the groups that had the supplies that we needed. I noticed that other groups were stealing supplies that they needed from other groups, but we didn't want to do that and we wanted to play fair. Our negotiations were definitely not successful because I think that we were too nice to the other groups and also because Taneka and me were the only ones in the group speaking up and trying to negotiate with the other groups. I think that if we all worked harder as a team, we might have done better. Another way I think we would have done better is if we were mean to them. Although it's a dirty way to win, I think that we should have stolen the supplies from the other groups. I think the saying, "Nice guys finish last" definitely comes to sense when doing a competitive activity