Hey Y’all, Max Here.
I did not go on the New Mexico field study so my post wont be quite as colourful as some of my peers. However, I have done quite a bit of work and research over the last month or so and I think it’s safe to say I know a lot about the current topic of our latest PLP project: The Manhattan Project ( this makes this a post about the Manhattan Project, Project. ).
It was a pretty slow start to the intro of the project, pretty standard. An important aspect of this project to point out is our groups. My group and I would be making a book about the Manhattan Project. Though not a terribly exciting proposal, there was a lot of unpredicted research and effort that went into this, but more on that later. Anyways, as the groups came together, I would be placed with Ben, Claire, Dylan, and Mateo. We even got our own basecamp channel for this project, a luxury I only experienced during PLP 9’s DI.
The New Mexico trip pretty much kicked off a week into our project. Fortunately, we went over the priorities of the trip for Ben and Dylan, who were the two human sacrifices to be handed over to the scorching heat of the American Southwest. These priorities were:
- Get media, ( photos and videos ) for use in the book.
- Get interviews from experts, historians, and ordinary people.
The main sites they visited were the Trinity Test Site, the White Sands Missile Range, and the Los Alamos testing and development site of the Manhattan Project. These locations are where everyone who went on the New Mexico trip got their photos, videos, interviews, and other stuff to use for the project.
When they got back, we ( Claire, Mateo, and I ) had done quite a bit of work on the book. It was starting to come together, but it was a tedious process. Errors with real-time collaboration in pages happen frequently when there is lots of information, or if more than a few people are editing at the same time, or both. Sometimes things just went wrong, just cause. Perhaps it was Steve Jobs’ ghost sabotaging our project for some reason.
This is also a good point to mention what we were actually learning. The Manhattan Project was the overarching subject but World War II, Atomic Research in general, and the Cold War ( which will be the main subject in the future, when the other half of PLP 11 goes to Nevada/ Arizona ). Learning about this subject was interesting enough, but especially since I had been in Japan this previous summer and saw firsthand what the city of Hiroshima looks like now, and the impact the Bombs had on Japan as a whole. Even compared to Tokyo or Osaka which were greatly impacted by the War, Hiroshima had an indescribable feeling of mourning covering much of the city, including the memorials I visited.
One aspect of the Manhattan Project not mentioned very often was the morals and justification of the bombs. Though history has idolized Oppenheimer and his team of scientists, I cannot understand. If humanity claims the heroes are those who kill hundreds of thousands, how far have we fallen? Needless to say, Hiroshima left a substantial impression on me.
As the project progressed, it became clear our book would be difficult to complete with the amount of time we were given. After looking at another groups book we knew we needed to make some big changes. There was a lot of outside of school editing and deliberation, as we were doing smaller reading/written assignments for this project as well, leaving us not much time to work on the book during class.
There were a few changes, and one big revision, but here it is:
This project was confusing sometimes and often slow-going, but the aspects of teamwork and collaboration proved to stretch my abilities, for better or for worse. While effective teamwork is nothing new, I will admit I did not demonstrate 100% of my capabilities. I’m only admitting my shortcomings now to mention Mateo and Claire pulling their weight the whole project, and then some. They worked overtime on weekends and after school to make our book presentable and high-quality. Without them I don’t think we would have finished at all.
That’s all for this post, more coming soon.