Oh no! There’s a killer squirrel!
This week our class worked on a completed our first project of the semester, cave paintings. It was an interesting and engaging assignment to do without being strenuous. Tuesday began with each group, defined by our tables, picking out two pieces of paper that contained phrases we had finished brainstorming over Hypothes.is. My group picked out the phrases “There is a dangerous squirrel attacking people by the lake” and a phrase about how the sun and moon rise and set. We ultimately chose the more obscure phrase about the squirrel since we thought it would be a fun challenge and not a easy to represent as the one about the sun and moon. After choosing our phrase, my group started creating a rough sketch of what we would present Thursday. We tried taking the main points of the phrase to represent such as “dangerous squirrel,” “attack people,” and “lake.” My main contribution was the idea of adding a tree to indicate the squirrel’s home was next to the lake since my main concern was that people would think the squirrel chased the people to the lake, rather than living by it. We also discussed how we wanted to expand our sketch of the lake since it initially looked like a pond.
After sketching out our prompt for Thursday, we had an engaging class discussion about the telegraph, and telephone. I partially thought the mention of telephone terror and relating it to the modern day’s fear of new technology was very interesting and to see how these patterns repeat themselves.
Anyway, on Thursday it was presentation time. My group volunteered to go second and we have worked out a system so that each of us knew exactly what part of the image to draw, for instead, I did the tree. After a lot of sketching and trying to add extra detail to our original plan, we opened it up for guesses. It took a couple of tries for people to get it, but I think we did a great job at following Pictionary rules by not explaining anything nor writing any words down. As people guessed, all we did was let them know if they were close to the answer or not, letting our work speak for itself. In the end, the final guess that was closest was “There is a killer squirrel near a watering hole.” While this wasn’t the exact wording of our paper slip, it was really close. Everyone else did a good job and, in particular, group 3’s sketch of cornhole rules led to an engaging conversation about how sometimes it takes one person to see something for everyone to. For instance, when I first saw their sketch I thought it was about making inventions, but as soon as someone said cornhole I could clearly see that.
Overall, this was a great class assignment as everyone had a chance to do their part and participate. It was also a good way to represent how some early forms of communication worked.
