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The Movies project was created by a group of three students, one boy, Harry, and two girls, Katie and Linda. This topic could be very interesting to write about, but they seemed to fail to make the most of it. Compared to the Beatles project, the Movies project was loosely organized and much less comprehensive. Three boys in the Beatles project dedicated themselves deeply to the project; they assigned the tasks evenly between themselves and cooperated with each other in a harmonious fashion. Somewhere in the middle of the project, they realized that the two girls were not involved in the project to the same extent as the boys, so they started to delegate some tasks to them. Basically, every team member of the Beatles project was involved in their project and did their best to contribute their own efforts to accomplish their goals. One might argue that as the Movie team consisted of only three students rather than five, we should not expect them to create a project of a quality equal to that of the Beatles project. However, we believe that the poorer quality of the Movie project was caused by the constant complaints and quarrels between Harry and Katie. 

At the very beginning of the project, Linda was very enthusiastic about the planning activities. She volunteered to document all their group's decisions. She even wrote an outline that listed all the contents of their project. This document became one important guideline for them throughout the project. Katie, who loves to sing, spent a lot of time singing with the microphone and paying no attention to their project. Katie also seemed more curious about what the other group was doing. Harry complained to us about Katie's behaviors which led to more conflicts between the two of them.

Harry was very interested in operating the camcorder and computer. He learned very quickly and was able to capture the photographs and video by following the procedures on the job-aids that were provided to him. He always asked for more advanced skills after he had mastered the old ones. 

Linda and Katie were quite fond of using a drawing program called PaintBrush, both of them spending a lot of time exploring its various functions. Harry could not do anything while they were playing with PaintBrush, so he just sat far away from the two girls. He thought Linda and Katie were doing something that was irrelevant to the project. Actually, the girls wound up using PaintBrush to create a colorful pie chart for their survey results later on. On the other hand, Katie complained that Harry was not cooperating on their project by not participating in the group activities. The misunderstandings kept growing and the quarrels between Harry and Katie never ended.

Harry did not like the idea of doing a survey on favorite movies; he thought that was a stupid idea, completely unnecessary. He also complained that his suggestions were not accepted by the two girls. He told us that he preferred to work alone.

The lesson to be learned from this project is that group dynamics can destroy any learning benefits. There seems to be several factors at play here. First, Harry seemed to want to proceed in a linear fashion, while the girls seemed to want to use a more organic approach. Either they needed to accommodate each other, or these two styles should not be mixed together.

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