Final blog post

By Arthur BRICQ June 17, 2020 Edition CHIC 2019-2020Discover Roots project

This is our final team blog post, Roots. The last milestone, two weeks ago, didn’t really close our yearly collaboration as we had to stay close for everyone’s exams (ECAL and EPFL are having exam sessions for CHIC projects). This milestone was marked by an extensive work on the story-telling and for the pitch. After discussing between us, we realized our presentations were following a wrong model (too much expectation, not enough results). We tried to adjusts this by including a nicely formatted video at the beginning of the story, to talk more about ’emotions’, and to reduce the quantity of technical data on our presentation in order to focus more on images and words.

As it was the last milestone, and that most of our exams are passed, it is now time to close this year of learning and of discovery.

The learning was really not only about technical skills. We got to work on many ‘soft-skills’, or interdisciplinary skills, should we say. We think that the most challenging learning was about team work. During the difficult times that we had to come through, our team remained united, its team work ‘saved’ us from failure, when we realize (several times) that our idea, our work, was going in the wrong direction. We have been lucky to find a great team, and only for several decisions or problems we had disagreement. Despite our different perspectives, we always found the words and the time to create this coherent team vision. Another topic that we all worked on is communication. Presenting milestones in real life and through video-conference was something new for us. Story-telling, pitching, presenting… We had to learn, we believe that finally we delivered a nice pitch ! We are really happy about this last presentation, which we believe was a really nice way to conclude this year.

And of course, the learning also involved many technical skills. How to make 3D objects with complex shapes, to print them in reality. How to make the Processing animations. How to make a PCB, to order it, to program it. How to design an open-source business model. And many more than this !

Our team was rather sad not to go to China and not to have the opportunity to work faster using laboratories and EPFL-ECAL-lab facilities. However, we have been surprised by how much work we could do remotely. We wanted to thank our teachers and all those from the supervising team who have helped us to be able to do this. It is clear that without this help, we wouldn’t have been able to reach this final product that was presented 2 weeks ago.

We hope to see you in September,

The Roots team !