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Inquiry 1 – Initial Reflection

Prepare as much as you can

Encountering with conservative people and trying to successfully persuade them always bring me an extreme bliss. I am actually not an orally intelligent person, so there must be something that helped me have that such feeling possibly once in a lifetime. It is the preparation. My conservative, aggressive “counterpart” at that time was a professor with a wide range of knowledge but being narrow-minded. We met each other in Vietnam Science and Engineering Fair (VISEF) 2018, where students across Vietnam created an application product and did a presentation in front of professors.

To understand more about our arguments below, I will tell briefly about this competition and how I got involved into it. I was informed about VISEF at the end of my 10th grade, so I had 3-month summer holiday to prepare for it, which would take place in the next school year. The major that I found myself interested in was Mechanical Engineering, and after some weeks considering, I and my friend decided to create a device which supporting blind people to read and write. From the very beginning, we did some research about related innovative products that already existed in the market. Our mission at that time was to think of a solution or develop a completely novel design to minimize the drawbacks of even most modern products, because everything was not perfect. Finally, we came up with an idea of a wheel-rotating machine with multiple functions so that users just need to put their hands at one position and read the content of the books continuously. We planned for a model and gradually searched for mechanic stuffs. It was such a hard time because not only that stuff needed to be good-qualified but it also had to be reasonably-priced and fixed with our model. We completed the machine after failing many times and brought it to some schools for blind people in our city for test trial. We made a survey about how they felt when using our product. Next, we started writing scientific report, which was also a significantly important part besides the machine. The report would reflect why and how we think of this device and its structure, what materials we used to create it, relevant information not only about other products but also about the area that we had researched for a long time, and definitely the survey as well. The final step was preparing for the presentation, where we would try to convince the examiners that our product has good, innovative points and potentials to develop in the future.

The competition came and I was quite confident because I carefully prepared for it, even with back-up plan. The first professor came, and he looked thin and old with very thick eye glasses. He seemed to be not comfortable with us and greeted us with a far-fetched smile. However, we tried to respect the elder people as usual and started our presentation. We told him about the scenario that we came up with that idea and explained why our model was necessary and optimal such as having wheel-rotated structure so that users could read information constantly, using materials could be easily found, including various functions in one machine. Then, we showed him the demonstration of our machine and explained about its functions including: reading, printing, and writing Braille letters, which are used for people with visual impairments. We also gave him some images, websites about the information of other products and explained why they were not suitable (high price, limitation in the number of letters displayed at one time, restriction of producing in a large scale due to complex technology, etc.). Indeed, everything definitely has some drawbacks. We were not afraid to share them to the professor and also showed the specific ways to fix and improve our machine. We ended our presentation by affirming that our product could possibly be applied to schools and produced on a large scale in the future.

The next part was his comments about our product and presentation. At first, he said students could not use this product because when we did the demonstration, the machine could not display some letters. We tried to explain to him that it was due to the fact that when we transported the machine to the competition, there must have been some malfunctions in the electronic circuits that we did not have enough time to recover it to its best state. We also presented him a video that we recorded days ago to demonstrate that our machine functioned flawlessly. He temporarily, but not completely, agreed with us at this point and continued to complain about the size of our product, which are too big and heavy, and about the material that we used, which was iron, was dangerous to students. We provided him a plastic version of the machine, which was designed to be smaller and lighter that we were planning develop in the future although it was not totally completed. We explained that we used the big iron model so that we could easily see the machine operates, fix it if there had any errors, and more importantly the cost to print all the model is extremely expensive for students like us. Although we enthusiastically presented about these things, he seemed to not focus or had any signs to show his agreement or even disagreement. However, we still tried to be persistent as much as we can. He turned out to make a point that our wheel structure would not be preferred compared to the conventional structure. He said that we could not change the reading habit of blind people and should not create such a totally new design like that. We continued to show him our survey that we had conducted at two schools for blind people previously, which stated that students were interested in this new structure. However, he still complained that the number of students in our survey was not enough to prove that the machine could be published widely. At that time, I felt a little bit triggered with him because even when I carefully conducted the surveys to prove for my points, they were still not accepted. However, I still perceived that I needed to be calm and persistent. I promised to him that I would come to more schools to gain more feedbacks and stated that I still believe that our model would be widely used. He gradually smiled to us and said we were the only group that successfully convinced him to believe in the potentials of our product not only by its amazing functions and structure but also by our persistence, our kindness and our knowledge preparation for every aspects relating to the machine. He also gave us feedback about how we could do to improve it, and I was shocked at that time because of his wide range of knowledge in terms of technology and engineering. We said goodbye to each other and I was extremely happy at that time because I could not believe that I persuaded such a conservative people like him.

In conclusion, I believe that to persuade other people, you cannot only just good at speaking or presenting something but also need to have base knowledge about the area that you want to discuss. Therefore, preparation is extremely necessary. In addition, everyone should try to be friendly, persistent and willing to listen and explain to the others even when they do not agree with our points or they are conservative.