Week 9

Talk about stress, the last two days my printer hasn't been working! Finally get the essay printed and realised I have no staples!...Then on the way to Unitec I had to stop for fuel, do you think the pump would work? no! did the staff there do anything useful?! NOO!! I ended up just making it to another petrol station, before running out of fuel, and charging my way through traffic getting to Unitec 15min late. At last I was able to hand in the Maori essay which is such a relief. Now for the next 4 assignments...

The group met in the library after handing in our individual essays. We made a huge hit on our poster, 3 hours worth of bouncing ideas off each other. I think our electric supercharger idea for our hybrid cars is going to be quite interesting. We've arranged to meet this sunday at Justin's house to continue our poster and compile our work for our portfolio.

Week 8

Got my assignment back, 13/20. I thought I'd at least deserve a 15. Apparently a well written assignment but the marker complained was that there was not enough depth to the info. I completely disagree. For one, it's only a 1000 word essay, not a book. I researched fibreglass with epoxy till my eyes bled.
And besides these little scenairos are dealt with differently based on whomever is dealing with it! It's all an opionated assignment so how can marked so low??

Another setback to our assignment today, the Unitec internet is being repaired apparently and so we weren't able to make any progress on our project.

Week 7

This week my group decided we would change subjects. Don't ask me what we are changing to cause they've no idea. They didn't want to do Hybrids as it's "too hard". I really thought this was a pathetic excuse and attitude. I like challenging myself, and as a group I think we could've come up with a good project on this subject.
This weeks homework will be to come up with a new subject, we better hurry up about it cause I'm starting to freak out about all the assignments from other classes that're coming up.

Week 6

Oh no the holidays have finished far too soon for my liking. I spent 10 days in Sydney, it's where all of my extended family live. My reason for returning for a few days was, one cousins engagement party, another cousins 21st, another cousins 30th and my uncles 50th. As you could imagine i timed this holiday to perfection and spent the whole time partying with family. It was so great as I rarely see them.
The assignment has now been handed in and I await the results, I hope I get a decent mark as I really put effort into this assignment.

Week 5

Today we focused on the Health and Safety aspects of our workshop.
Some points we made are:

• Hybrid Solutions is comitted to providing a safe working
  environment for employees, customers and volunteers( work
  experience) and any other staff member on the premises.
• We will maintain a safe work environment, and provide
  adequate safety equipment when needed.
  
• Under the HSE Act the employee has the right to refuse to perform work likely to cause serious harm.

We made a really good presentaion on 'Presentaion X5' on Windows 7 (the new version of powerpoint). Unfortunately using this program did not let us open it on a Unitec computer as it is to out of date. This was really dissappointing as we had put a lot of effort into making a good presentation this week and we weren't able to present it. We have no other program to use as no one else in our group has a laptop.

Ive completed the first written assignment as I'm going on away during the holidays for 10days. I've just asked about how to hand it in and what sort of cover page is needed, so it shall be finalised very soon.

Week 4

My group has finally come up with a name, Its Hybrid Solutions.
Our main idea is to make Hybrid cars more effective by improving on the quality of the battery, we will be putting high powered, environmentally friendly lithium batteries in.
Todays task was about Sustainability. By improving the hybrid we are helping to maintain a green environment. As we will be helping to use less fuel and more renewable resources(better batteries).

Our presentation covers this in more detail. The problem with our presentation is that at the last minute we realised that we were able to put the presentation onto the projector. So within 5min I typed all of our handwritten info into a Word docuement. By doing this is wasn't a very pretty presentation but we simply didn't realise earlier that we could use the projector to use.

Next weeks presentation will be better prepared as we have learnt from our mistake.

Week 3

Week 3's class consisted of only one teacher, giving a brief explanation on our assignment then leaving us to teach somewhere else. So our group went to work on our group project, Kevin was away, but we had a new group member called Justin joined us. We spent the time finalising our group name, slogan and project idea, but I'm sure when Kevin comes back he'll want to have a say as well, so still nothing has been decided.
After this we went to a computer class, of which was unnesscary as we already know how to use moodle and the online library etc..
Next was the referencing lesson, this is something I did need to know, but like everyone else in the class I really struggeled to concentrate and simply stay awake in one of the most boring lectures in existence. I have never seen a class empty so quickly at the end of the lesson.

Week 2

Todays task was to come up with 5 communication probelms that occur during the workforce. We were then to find the causes, costs and solutions to these problems.
Some of our problems were, Lack of understanding in colleagues, Peoples attitudes and loud noise workplaces.

These problems affect people working everyday, thats why its critical that we address these problems and reduce there negative effects.
In our groups we had to give presentations to the class, every group we talked to did not realise this was going to be the case every week. Never the less we bluffed our way through our presentation, Kevin really can talk...

As a group we've decided to meet after class every tuesday to do some group work before the wed class. This time together will help us focus and sort out what needs to be done, and which person will be doing what task in the group.

I think this will be crucial to passing this class.

Week 1

Today was the first day we had the subject Communication skills. As its really all about talking about how you are feeling, I can't see most of this being used in a work environment. For instance, the boss of the workshop is not going to ask how I'm feeling about work everyday.
We were then givin the task of thinking up ideas for our project. As the main focus of the automotive industry is to be fuel and emission efficient followed closely by safety. My group choose to think of new ways we could get cars to run on other fuels. We were very stretched for ideas as all manufacturers are already trying to solve the problem. So our ideas turned out to be a bit more radical. 1. Was that we could try get the car to run off electric, petrol, biodeisel and Hydrogen(water powered) to cancel out each others bad effects.
The 2nd idea was to have solar panels and small wind turbines on top of cars to power hybrid cars more effectively.