20 Time Individual reflection

For my twenty time project, I wanted a project that had something based in psychology because it is super fascinating to me and I never really get a chance to explore it. Both Ella and I wanted a psychology based project.  After doing some research, Ella and I came across the "Fun Theory". It seemed interesting and, at the time, the most reasonable theory to use in our project with the materials we had. It showed cause and effect between making boring things fun and a willingness to do it more. We chose to try and answer the question how can we use the Fun Theory to improve our everyday lives? Our goal was not to prove the fun theory, but rther to find a way to use it. This really challenged my creativity, as we needed to think of mundane/hated activities and how to make them fun. I wanted to find a way(s) to slightly improve my daily life, and if possible, the life of the student body at Saratoga High. 

First, we had to come up with a list of things we disliked, found boring, or were generally mundane. This was quite easy. It was more difficult to figure out ways to make them fun that were doable,cheap, and not time consuming. For example, we thought about making fancy shapes out of disliked food such as tomatoes. We realized that people may eat them if someone else made it for them, but were not going to take the time to do it themselves. If we found a way to make something fun, we quickly asked around and found that most people did not consider either the activity boring or the improvement fun. We kept on getting stuck on the definition of the word "fun" and often switched around our main question. This was quite time-wasting. Three vague experiment ideas only came up by the beginning and middle of April. 

The project was not very successful. It is definitely something that needed to be long term. Our brainstorming took too long and gave us too little time to carry out the experiments. We needed to spend a lot more time on this outside of allotted twenty time. We have gathered data from one experiment, and are trying to finish up two short ones. Realistically, only one will be completed. I learnt that it is good to have a solid plan before starting, and too not get very caught up with brainstorming. It is easier to have a fixed product or conclusion to reach than to build off a theory. If I could do this project again, I would definitely do something psychology based again, but with more reliable results/experiments/products. I would have tried to answer a question rather than apply a psychological theory to everyday life. For the Fun theory, I may have tried to prove it or see if people use it in their daily lives. This project feels that it is just starting. Potentially, it could be investigated very thoroughly, however, we would need more resources. It was difficult to find a list of ways to improve daily life without set-up, expenses or on a daily basis. We would have liked to have a longer list to share with our classmates on how they can improve their daily lives. Unfortunately, we only have a couple. I may try to find fun improvements to my daily life or give suggestions to my friends if they complain about a boring aspect of their lives.