Workshop 01

Thinking... - Source

For our first workshop we worked on a traffic light situation. Using the Irish Rules of the Road we had a crossroads with four sets of traffic lights, with no turning lights and we had to accommodate for pedestrians crossing the road too as there were no pedestrian crossing buttons. A screenshot of the task is pictured below. 

Traffic Light Situation - Source Video

Our task was to find out how the traffic lights worked to allow the cars to drive on or turn and for pedestrians to cross without any crashes or accidents happening. 

Myself and my partner got to work brainstorming how this scenario worked. Our first thought was that the traffic lights were programmed to stop and start at certain times to allow one line of cars to go and some pedestrians to cross. Our lecturer Shaun told the class to think about explaining it in more detail and possibly using a flowchart to explain the sequence that all the events occur in. 

I have not had to solve a scenario like this before so it was interesting to attempt to do it. It forces you to look at situations from a different perspective, to look at other solutions and to look at other ways that something might work. 

I find writing about the task at hand a little difficult as we did not manage to solve the scenario, but I think that that is partly due to it being our first active lecture and partly due to a bit of writer’s block coming back from the summer holidays. I feel that for future workshops this should not be a problem as we as a class will be back into the swing of class activities and that it should be easier to write about what we’ve done.