About two weeks before we gave our final presentation our group sat down over lunch and we discussed ways that we could represent what we leaned this semester.  All of us agreed that this class helped each of us to see the thin or overlapping boundary between science and literature.  Our original intent was to go through our notebook and select a few key terms that we had repeatedly discussed throughout the semester.  Thinking back to our lower school days (maybe for some of us middle school...or college) we decided to organize these terms into a venn diagram with the two main circles being science and biology.  We expected that most of the terms would correspond to either biology or literature, but that some terms would find a home in the middle circle.

While planning our final performance, MissArcher2, MSA322, rubikscube, and I, thought back to the beginning of this course and the challenge we were presented with of creating an open dialogue by allowing others to speak and accepting that others may say an idea we had first. We decided to lead an interactive exercise with the class that demonstrated this process.

In this exercise everyone closed their eyes and tried to count to 10 collectively as a group. If any two people spoke at the same time, the game wool start over again at 1. It was interesting to see what patterns arose from the exercise, and why people chose to call out numbers when they did or remain silent. Our group was surprised at how quickly the class was able to complete the exercise.

Like Merlin, I created my Portfolio online.  Thanks, for the idea, Merlin :)

Here is the link to my portfolio: thegistofspreston.tumblr.com/

For our end of the year presentation, our group decided to play Mafia, a game in which a "town" of people, including townspeople, mafia members, and an inspector, must vote on which townsperson committed the last murder (full rules belo We wanted to play this game to see how people gather their information.  Because their eyes are closed during the "murder," the townspeople must base their decision on information they gather through the town meetings - how can one separate lies from real information?  It was interesting to watch the class play this game because the first person to get killed was the inspector - the member who actually knew who a mafia member was!  The mafia members were able to convince the rest of the group that the inspector was very su

            For our final presentation, kgould, m.agazaarian, Oak, and I created a GIST version of the card game Apples to Apples that used, obviously, GIST-centered words. Each round, one of the players was chosen as a judge, usually by seating order, and randomly drew an adjective card. The other players would then look through their hands for the noun they felt best ‘matched up’ with the presented adjective, and put their chosen card in the middle. The judge then chose the noun they feel best ‘matched up’ with the adjective; the player who submitted the winning noun card got to keep the adjective.