Reva's Final 20 Time post

Hey! This is the final post I will be posting on our blog, since our project has come to an end. We might continue this experiment, but that is doubtful. Hope you enjoyed going on this journey!

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.

Watch our TED talk here!

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

Actually Moving Ahead

Hello friends….

We have been having a lot of difficulty thinking of experiments; however, we have reached a turning point in our project in the past two weeks by finally deciding on potential experiments to conduct in order to improve our lives. We have decided that we wanted to center part of our focus on health, by making healthier foods more fun. To do this, we will try transforming vegetables into roses or fun shapes such as elephants,etc. This will determine if it is an appropriate way to make healthy food more fun. We also decided we want to use our fun theory idea to advocate for saving the planet. Basketball hoops will be placed over recycling bins in certain classrooms to see if that will make people more likely to throw away paper into the right bin. The next steps are to talk to teachers and carry out these experiments. We can apply these things to improve our school. :)

So far, not so good....

So far, we have not done much. Our candle of inspiration was brightly lit, but now it is dim

1. We have learned that there are many other fun theory experiments that have been tested. There have been experiments to make throwing trash away fun, making people obey the speed limit for a reward, recycling bottles, and much more. We also dove into the field of psychology by looking at the different factors that people are influenced by.

2. We need to focus on the bigger picture rather than getting caught up in the small details of what we will do.

3. Our major setback is the fact that we can not think of an experiment that is reasonable to do within the boundaries of Saratoga High School. To attack this problem, we need to be more aware of possible experiments we could conduct in the school and getting some serious brainstorming finished.

4. Our next step is to brainstorm more experiments. We have tried thinking of a few, but they are either not doable or pointless.

5. We might use these experiments in our own school, since some of them would benefit the daily lives of the student body such as having a cleaner school.

Here we go! -Identifying the Problem

So far, we have learned that our question is very vague and it needs to get narrowed down to a more specific topic. We also learned about things that people dislike, and these can be changed because these are good things that people need in their lives but do not like doing, since they are boring.

We found there is not much in our own personal lives that we dislike AND can make a difference to.

In these past two weeks, there have been a lot of setbacks. We are unsure exactly of what situations we can use to improve our lives or how to make them more fun. Currently, our project is in the brainstorming stage. We wish that we made our original 20 time question more specific.

More brainstorming is necessary but at least we established that we want to improve our everyday lives, but do it with the fun theory. Firstly, we need to define what is "fun"? This is one problem we came across this week in our planning.

According to dictionary.com:

Fun

noun

1. something that provides amusement

2. enjoyment or playfulness

Something is defined as fun if we use the fun theory to make it more enjoyable, as well as having positive benefits on daily life.

Depending on what the definition of fun is only then we can measure our progress.

We have determined that we want our fun activities to fall in the following categories:

-mental health

-physical health

-food health

To make these groups of life-improvements enjoyable, we must create a way to do them that causes us to both look forward to the activity and enjoy accomplishing it. Applying our entire project to the student body of SHS would be our goal because we want t to improve the lives of our fellow classmates.

Do you sometimes just get bored regular, old, everyday life?

Do you hate the guilt from skipping gym for one day?

Do you dread the time of week when you have to clean your house?

Do you cringe every time you have to make your child eat his/her veggies?

These are just some questions that most of us know the answer to ….. and can find fun solutions to.

This is Reva and Ella. We will be documenting the progression of our 20% Time project in biology. The 20% time project, or passion  project, is when someone dedicates 20% of their time (hence the name) to do something they are passionate about and want to develop or take the time to learn more about.  We want to find how can we use the Fun theory to improve our everyday lives (by improving mental/physical health etc.) We have chosen to follow the model of the “fun theory” to construct a variety of experiments that will give people little things to do in their day-to-day lives that will not only improve their health, but also improve their personal happiness : )

We are both very interested in human psychology (and hate tedious tasks). This project fell under that category and also seems very doable in the time period we have. This project answers the essential question because The Fun Theory states that by making something seem more approachable and fun, people are more likely to do it. By making something more “fun” we can make people do it. We will do this for tedious tasks that although we hate, are good for our health and well being.

Our goals are to successfully complete at least three experiments with two trial rounds.

We will sometimes measure our progress by asking the people who participate in our experiments to measure how much happier or healthier they felt on a scale of 1 to 10. Other times, when given the choice between a fun way or a usual way to doing something, it will be obvious what the results are.

Our plan is to have a boring task and a “more fun” version of that task. Right now, we will come up with a group of basic solutions to boring tasks. Then, set up an experiment to test to see if people are more likely to do it. With this data, we can make a list of things that people can do to make their lives happier and healthier. We will post this list on this site to conclude our project.