For the most part, when I create the student groups my approach is completely random. My philosophy is that you often don't get to choose who you work with in the real world, so why should you have that luxury in school. However, with this group my picking was a little less random; I put all the female students into one group. I think part of it was my surprise that there was actually more than one girl in the class. The other side of it was to create a little bit of rivalry amongst the sexes - let's see if the girls can put the boys in their place.
The first task the teams have is to define roles and responsibilities. The responses are usually quite straightforward, with the work being split out into the separate crafts. This person is the modeler, this person the animator, this one the texture artist, etc. The girls however, took a much more democratic approach to the work. Rather than splitting the task into specialties, they decided that everyone would do an equal amount of the work with each person in the group identified as the a 'lead' in their area of expertise. Depending on where they were in the production cycle, a different person would be leading the work. As a result, everyone was exposed to all aspects of the pipeline with support coming from everyone on the team. Their decision to work this way was completely academic as they felt the learning experience was more important than the outcome.
The results? Well you can judge for yourself, but considering that a huge part of this exercise is to learn how to collaborate, I think these girls not only did well, they broke the mold.
Here's their org chart for this project.
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