Hello folks, ready for this post? Some of you may remember the winter exhibition that happened last year. It was Star Wars themed, and it a was very very different  then this years. 

In this exhibition post I will be discussing three things :    

• • A run through of our project, and the room we were in (the last part of that sentence will make more sense very soon) 
  • A behind the scenes of how we set this all up. 
  • And finally a reflection on what I thought about this project. 

What was this project? 

Well this all might make more sense if you knew what our project was.

1.  The first part of our project started with our chemistry stories (click here to see the post). In that part we created stories based on chemical bonding, which is when two atoms (or more depending on the type of atoms) join together and form a bond. We then had to take all the science information and make it into a story with characters.  We were in partners then, and after we finished with our chemical stories we joined up with another two other pairs of partners and created a new story about chemical bonding. My teammates were Luciano, Jordyn, Fraser, Kyle and Jason. 

Here is our story (read the diagram it will really help):

 

The second part was “ coming up with a way to present this”. Okay cool we wrote a story. So now how do we present that? Each group was assigned a room and told to create an immersive experience. Now… what is an immersive experience? Well in our case we wanted to create “the experience” of the story we had written. 

That means that we wanted people to be able to walk into our room and experience a time and a place in our story with a few interactive parts of the room and having me and my teammates play characters from the story. 

Our characters:

 

 

Behind the scenes 

Well if you have read the story diagram above this will all make a lot more sense.  We decided to set our room up at the climax of our story. If you read our story (diagram above!) you will know that during the climax, Pete was dying and Florence was about to try and save him. Florence can only save him by taking one of his Valence electrons. The location was the Pete’s gang’s base, also known as the Alkali compound. You will also know that Florence and Pete are in love but they are from opposite gang so it’s pretty intense, which makes the whole thing more interesting. 

Here what’s the room plan we created to plan out what was going to go where in our room:

 

 

 

 

You might be a bit confused about the room so I’ll break it down. If you were to visit our room on the night of.

You walk up to the room. Humphrey will try and explain the sour to the people before they walk into the room. This what you see: 

The first thing you see when you walk in is cardboard boxes, lots of them which represents the illegal molecule trade that the gangs made their money off of. You hear dramatic music in the background. 

Then the snack table pressed against the far left wall. 

 

If you turn to the right there is then a table with Christopher sitting there. He’ll ask you for help put me together a newspaper, which has some information on the backstory of the characters. This is the first interactive part of our room. 

Then I will try and get you to come help me. I look desperate. Behind me I reveal a curtained off area. And behind the curtain there is Pete, who is dying. The second interactive experience is a game of “switch the electron to save Pete”, which you place a ball in the top of, it goes down a ramp and falls into a cup which is on a pulley and moves up. 

The final part of the room ends with a video of a news report which tells you the ending for our story.  

 

 

The behind the scenes bit was setting this all up. It was really really hard. You might have thought you planned out where everything went but no! There were slot of on the spot decisions to make. Like for example on of the walls in our classroom there was a painted tree. Which we had to cover up with newspapers, which actually helped the whole gang feeling. 

Here is the before collection of our room

 

Reflection 

This is another project I’m glad I did but glad it’s over. It was very fun but very stressful having to sort out everything with in a small amount of time for the exhibition. It was a challenging project, when we combined math and science with humanities and maker. So there was really a lot expected of us. But it was relly very educational experience.