The first linking assignment I am going to reflect on will be Braden Litt’s potato printing.

I decided to focus on Braden’s potato printing task as it was completely different from mine. Firstly, I am going to share the post I made on his task. 

“I never thought of writing the whole word on one potato. That was genius of you! You only had to waste one potato whereas I used five small potatoes and cut them in half. It must have been challenging to carve out the entire word mirrored. Did you end up having to start all over with any errors that you made? Or did you just cut the potato down and try to save it?

If I did an entire word on one potato, I would have had a difficult time making them all uniform. When you noticed that some were uneven, did you notice after stamping it with paint, or just by looking at the potato before printing?”

As mentioned in the post, Braden wrote his entire 5-letter word on one potato compared to the many small potatoes I used by cutting them in half. This is the first indication that my colleague’s experience was different from mine. If Braden were to make a mistake with the letters that he printed, he would have to completely start again. Whereas with my letters, if I were to make a mistake, which I did, I only had to redo that one letter. He had to pay close attention to the unity of all the letters, making sure that the height and widths were consistent. Again, if he were to make a mistake and make one of his letters shorter than the rest, the stamp would not have been complete as one of the letters would have been barely visible.

Initially, Braden spent time planning how he was going to create his stamp. This was a smart idea so that he would catch any mistakes prior to starting the cutting. As for myself, I just visualized the letter’s shape in my head before cutting out the letter. I wonder if I were to pre plan my approach, would that allow for less mistakes to happen? 

Finally, Braden wrote all of the letters in lowercase compared to mine that were all uppercase. This makes me wonder which approach was easier to carve out. I know that I wrote mine in all uppercase because I thought it would be easier with more straight lines compared to curves. If Braden were to carve out all uppercase letters, he would have avoided doing curves all together as all of his uppercase letters would have been straight lines. We also did words that were dissimilar. His word was “whale,” whereas mine was “words.” We both had the letter “w,” however, the rest of the letters were different. I wonder what made him choose the word “whale.”