week of 2/1/11 Instruction Manual

I think the instruction manual assignment helped us not only learn how to write an instuction manual that is very detailed, but also taught us the importance of communicating so that people we work with understand every step. When you don't say things the correct way things can be misconstrued. Not only do people communicate differently when they are very similar we have a vast array of different types of people in the U.S. who think and speak differently so it's important to go with a universal approach when constructing an instruction manual. We learned this after our first attemt. We did not think that people could mess up an object so simple.

When we started having another group work on the project their's looked similar but was not exact. We'd missed telling them how much clay exactly they needed when building the object so it was not preportioned correct and the object was not the right size in areas. By being able to watch someone else fail at our directions we were able to fix them when re-writing our next set of instructions. It was very hands on and overall the perfect way to learn how to write a good instruction manual.