20 Time Final post

Ella's and my 20 time project was to follow the model of the fun theory to try and make everyday activities more fun to improve peoples' health and happiness. Here is a summary of our experience.  For a month we brainstormed different ways to make activities more fun. We only started conducting experiments in early April, since our experiments had a lot of variables, or the ones we thought of were too complex. Our first experiment aimed to make our school cleaner by adding basketball hoops over trashcans  to making throwing trash away more fun. We found that after adding the hoop there was a spike in the amount of trash people threw away. Once we took it away, the number dropped.

Amount of trash people threw away in the team room

We also tried to make homework more fun by giving people small tests with "Fun pens" (sparkly gel pens). The people who used the fun pens said it was more fun than a regular pen and they would take the quiz again. One person who used a regular pen said she would take it again if she had a fun pen. There are still a lot of ways that we can make life more fun, but it is difficult to be creative.

Our TED talk went well overall, although it could have been better. I was not happy with my stage presence and projection, since I know that I can utilize the stage better. We memorized certain parts and were able to replicate it. However, I forgot to  state our original thesis that tied in all the concepts, but Ella said it later. I think we meet all the parts of the rubric, except we went really fast. When we timed ourselves, we were at 5 minutes 30 seconds each time, but our actual talk was 4 minutes 18 seconds. The balloon idea actually worked surprisingly. I was worried that it would take away from our talk, but it seemed to enforce it. Ella and I met up twice outside of school for 6 hours total to work on the talk. We skyped several times and practiced it completely at least three times. I learnt that a lot of work goes into things that last for less than 5 minutes. Listening to other talks was really interesting because I did not know what to expect going in, and I learnt what everyone was interested in