Critical Reflection

 Critical Reflection

Setting goals at the start of this module allowed me to focus on how to improve myself using the teachings of this module. This also helped improve my efficiency in learning the critical thinking and communication skills offered by this module. The goal I set for myself were to brush up on my English language proficiency and understand how to communicate better through my choice of words by applying critical thinking.

 

 

The many weekly assignments were a great start towards achieving these goals as it made me read more and write more and that helped me understand the huge variety and application of grammar and vocabulary. These assignments also help us apply critical thinking by making us analyse the writings and pick out what is the most important aspects which eventually allowed me to write my summary reader response without a huge difficulty curve. The continuous practice of habitually analysing the different articles then allows us to pick out key ideas with relative ease in order to gain a deeper understanding. As engineers, we will definitely be tasked in the future to come up with new and improved designs to keep pace with the ever-evolving world. The ability to analyse and pick up the main ideas can bring credibility to our work as it allows us to understand how the current designs work and lack helping us come up with a new and improved solution that is focused rather than simply for the sake of coming up with something new. The mini presentations on our assignments also helped build up my confidence in expressing my ideas with a better usage of grammar and vocabulary which ties in with the ability to analyse as our roles as engineers is also be able to present our ideas into words, especially in more lament terms to a more general audience.

 

Project learning

In our technical report project, we had to analyse an existing product as a group and figure out how we can improve it with our own modifications. In the discussion leading up to the writing of the report, we had many differing ideas which caused much difficulty on settling on a product to improve. The discussion and idea difference also carried onto the modification ideas and our report format. We finally settled on the most optimal ideas after each discussing our point of views. This small roadblock has helped me realise the importance of communication which helped us become more open to different opinions. Being able to accept differing opinions helps see things from different perspectives, helping us learn. The need to write a professional report is also of paramount importance as we are proposing it to a company and we want them to take our proposal seriously. The next part of this project is to make a pitch to the stakeholders. In order to make ourselves credible and convincing, we had to exude confidence in ourselves and the idea we are proposing. The challenge was to condense the main points of our report down such that it provides all the necessary details without being too overwhelming. This is where what we have learnt previously is being put to the test, helping me realise that putting our learning into practice is the best way to efficiently absorb knowledge.