This year for Pi-day, I decided to be a part of the organising committee. I was a part of the Decor team and physics team. As a member of both teams, I was responsible for contributing to ideas in decor, setting up the venue while also having my own physics demonstration stall. I participated in this event to show my love for math and physics, while also helping other realise the beauty and importance of this irrational number and the discoveries it helped scaffold.
LO1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
Although I was part of the decor team, I wasn’t in particularly very creative. Setting up the right visuals was something that I could improve one. However setting up and preparing the decorations was something that worked out for me. As for the physics team, I was and always am a fan of practical demonstrations! To do so I had planned a series of interesting ideas beforehand. However effective communication follows a good demo, which was something that needed to be worked upon, so that people visiting my stalls actually understand the true essence and importance of this day.
LO2 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
Throughout this journey, a lot of challenges had to be dealt with so that the final event was a success. For example, as for the decor team, I helped the team assembly the decorations. One piece to decoration which didn’t seem to stand still were the magic hats that were made. After trying a number of solutions and a little bit to trail and error, using proper placement of sticks I was able to make the hats stand still. Similar challenge was faced by other decor material. As a child, not very artistic, I did develop my fine and gross motor skills to a certain extent, working with different tools and decor material. One more challenge was to find the perfect demo for the pi day that would be interactive. Through research and surveying the teachers supervising us, me and my team (stall members of physics) decided to go ahead with demonstrating the tennis racquet theorem, Eratosthenes model, mass balancing and fermi questions to make the stall interactive and fun! Finalising the topic and doing demo runs was also a little bit of a task, however it did help in solidifying my communication skills and helped me effectively convey the content.
LO3 – Initiate and plan a CAS experience
As part of the physics team, I did initiate a lot of brainstorming taken place as a team, with help of by supervisors and my team, we came up with many ideas for both decor and physics. Prior to the event, I also attended frequent early ins. For gathering material for the demo, I also had to plan, organize and collect all the demo resources for the event day.
LO5 – Demonstrate skills and benefits of working collaboratively.
The D-day was a big event, planning, organizing and executing that was a challenge. Luckily we were a total of 25-30 people working on it. With effective allocation of roles, we were able to prepare decor material, stall on time. Working in a team reduced the number of hours we had to spend on one thing, dividing and assigning roles was also something that proved to be beneficial as it led to more work done. One challenge with working in a team was to take regular follow-ups on what is done and what is left, at time when work was not done, the plan had to change. Apart from this, working in a team in unison helped make the event a success.
In conclusion, heinging in organizing the Pi-day helped me express my love for physics and math, while also helped me develop certain set of skills which will be useful to me in the future.
Evidence:
