Nice to Meet You

How can you work with team members you haven't met? The key to a good team is communication. The goal of this exercise is to spend some time getting to know your teammates, your mentor, and to learn different methods of communicating.

Resources

If you would like to "talk" or "chat" with each other, use synchronous communications. You can use Skype or your favorite IM.

BIG HINT FOR SUCCESS: We recommend that your team mostly use asynchronous communications. This is talking by leaving notes to other people whenever YOU are available on the computer (email, Facebook, messages on your personal homepage here at Global Challenge).

Asynchronous communications might seem harder or slower than just chatting, but in a global workteam, with the time zone differences YOUR TEAM CANNOT AFFORD TO TRY TO SET UP SCHEDULES THAT WILL WORK FOR EVERYBODY. But email and your team workspace won't help the team either if people do not connect very often. THE TEAM CANNOT WAIT TO "HEAR BACK" FROM PEOPLE. YOUR TEAM WILL MOVE TOO SLOW AND NEVER GET ITS WORK DONE IF YOU DON'T COMMUNICATE OFTEN. The team has to get to know each other, trust each other, and use regular (daily or every other day) communications to move forward.

Share Personal Information

All team members and your mentor should share their name, what they like to be called, their favorite hobby or special interest, what courses they are taking in school, what their strengths are, etc. Save your conversation in a file to review later and possibly use in your solution.

Share Files

Practice sharing files by sending your teammates a picture of yourself. Share with your teammates information about your family, culture, and interests. Exchange your school calendars and discuss school vacation and final exam periods in order to begin thinking about a timeline for your final submission. Save pictures of your teammates in your Global Challenge folder.

Interview a Teammate

Interview one of your teammates from  another country and write a paragraph about him or her, including a picture. See examples of paragraphs about Key Personnel in past winning solutions.

GRAB YOUR POINTS!

Log into your team wiki space. Create an attachment for your file by clicking Page Operations, Attachments. Title your file Nice to Meet You: Interview a Teammate so that we can credit you for your work!