What? So What? Now What?

At the community service event, I observed many people work together to come up with different strategies to complete the five activities. Some of the activities were pretty straightforward, but others required significant amounts of teamwork and planning. The activity using pipes to get balls into the can took forever. In my group, completion of some activities involved a lot of trial and error, which is my favorite strategy to solve any problem. It's not very efficient, but it works. The activities did a decent job of team building for my group.

I didn't really learn a new skill, unless building a bike with extremely straightforward directions counts (so easy, a caveman can do it). I expected the event to focus more on community service than team building, though it turned out to be the exact opposite. I guess that was beneficial for getting to know people in your group, but I also felt we could have built a lot more bikes than we did. The team building helped me learn new things about the people in my group. For example, one guy is a yo-yo master and he demonstrated some tricks for us.

If I could do something differently, it would probably be for each group to build five bikes so that more kids could receive bikes. The bike wasn't very hard to build, so four more wouldn't be a stretch. It was gratifying to see the kid assigned to our bike start riding it with a huge smile on his face, though getting him to ride it was a bit of an ordeal because he was very shy. It would be cool if a lot more kids could have the same smile after receiving bikes. Expanding the community service part while still maintaining the team building component would be better, in my opinion.