Mrs. Bennett asked our Design Thinking class to create activities to celebrate Mary Badham’s visit. Ms. Badham is the actress who portrayed the young girl, Scout, in the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird." After brainstorming, we decided to create two activities for Upper School advisory groups to complete: creating memory boxes and a geocache activity.
The memory boxes were meant to symbolize the cigar box full of memorabilia Jem and Scout had in the book. Each advisory group was asked to decorate their own box together. Inside the box, each member of the group drew one item or memory on an index card they would want to place in the box.
Mrs. Bennett stated, “My group loved drawing and coloring the memories. We enjoyed the activity and learned a lot about one another.”
There were several interesting items drawn from special pieces of jewelry, stuffed animals, and pictures of families. What would you place in a memory box? Scout and Jem had an old pocket watch, soap dolls, a spelling medal, crayons, an old mirror, gum, pennies, marbles, and other items they found in a tree. We learn in the book that Boo Radley left the items for Jem and Scout to find. Learning about these objects, and other items in the book, led to the second activity our class created for advisory groups to complete.
The Design Thinking class worked diligently for a month to create a unique, fun and fair geocache for the Upper School Darlington community. Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.
There are nine people in our class so we each selected one object from the book to create and hide in the geocache activity. We learned how to design our objects using the 3D software Tinkercad. Then, we printed our designs on the new 3D printer in the MakerSpace.
We knew we had to create several different “hunts” because several students would be searching at the same time. We each had to print six objects of the design we had created and then put the objects in boxes and decided where to hide them. On the inside of each box was a description of each item and the GPS coordinates. Then, we created 28 different Geocache searches and assigned one to each advisory group. The groups had to work together to find the objects and write the correct name of each object next to the coordinates. This was all extremely complicated and time consuming to organize!
Here is a list of the objects members of the class created:
Bailey: Pocket Watch
Thomas: Gum
Jacob: Boy and Girl Soap Dolls
Davis: Spelling Medal
Isabella: Fire
Tigger: Pants
Rene: Mockingbird
Lawson: Baton
Karl: Fire
Do you know the significance of all these objects in "To Kill a Mockingbird"? If not you should read the book and/or see the movie.
Our class also had to work together to decide how to write the directions for the two activities and communicate with everyone at the Upper School. Mrs. Bennett decided to make the completion of the activities a contest. The advisory group that discovered the most items, in the shortest amount of time, and put the most creativity into creating the memory box would win $100.00 and a dress down day!
Mr. Evans’s advisory group was the only one to find all nine objects correctly. Mrs. Jacobs’s group won the $100.00 and dress down day for finding several items and putting a lot of effort into making an amazing memory box.
The class enjoyed creating these activities for the Upper School. We would like to thank Mrs. Bennett for encouraging us to complete them and for inviting Mary Badham to speak at the chapel.
