It wasn’t a birthday party, but it was more fun than a typical birthday party and a precursor to a quarter birthday party.
On September 11, 2012 I presented an
Education by Entertainment program titled
Games to Explain Human Factors: Come, Participate, Learn and Have Fun!!! to selected engineering students at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. While the primary purpose of this program was to introduce the students to designing products and systems so that they will be safe, easy and fun to use, the program itself was presented in the form of a game show. During this program students were asked to participate in activities which illustrated what people can and cannot do. Some activities involved the entire audience and some of the activities involved an “on stage” participant or a small group of “on stage” participants. The activities were a “ton of fun.” Indeed, the program as a whole was more fun than a typical party.
An example of a group activity involved having the entire audience spell the word SPOT really fast five times, and then answering the question “
What do you do at a green light?” People wanted to say “
Stop”, but of course, the right answer would normally be “
Go.”
An example of a small group activity was having an on stage participant perform a variety of tasks while wearing inversion prisms which made everything appear to be upside down.
Successfully completing an individual or small group activity qualified the participant as a semifinalist. At the conclusion of the program the audience selected a Champion from all of the semifinalists. Prizes (including birthday t-shirts, birthday hats, birthday bandanas and ribbons (as shown in photo on right) as well as trophies, plush animals, buttons, magnets, and cards (shown in the photo album)) were awarded to the champion, semifinalists and other audience members.
While I had intended to provide refreshments during the program, audience members and I became so involved in the program that I did not remember to serve the refreshments until everyone went home.
Room decorations were limited to setting up a prize table, because the room did not become available to us until 10 minutes before the program was scheduled to begin.
A photo album of the program was placed on
SlideShare. The SlideShare team was obviously very impressed with the album as they chose to feature it on their homepage on September 14, 2012 (SlideShare features just a few of the thousands of presentations uploaded each day).
Congratulations are due to our Champion Raewyn Duval, and our semifinalists Charlie Brickley, Evan Starr, and Josh Leuing. Special thanks are due to our sponsor Dr. Daniel J. Hannon and to Josh Pfosi who helped with the program.
The complete album may be viewed on
SlideShare.
RonRonald G. Shapiro, Ph. D.Education By Entertainment
Posted On:
Sep 14, 2012 at 10:50 PM