Teen Health Awareness 2014
Making a Change with Humanities
Through research and surveying, we were able to answer the questions What can schools do to improve child and adolescent health?, How much of your activity should occur in school and in what form?, and What is the relationship between mental health and physical health? in our Humanities class. We started off by reading various research articles about health and analyzing their data and statements. We then focused on collecting data of our own. As a team, we created several surveys inquiring about the current state of physical education and activity that we sent to parents, teachers, administrators, and students at various schools in California. We then set out to interview the public to get more specific data and recommendations. All of this data we collaborated to analyze and use the data to answer our essential questions. Our findings, we paired with our research and displayed in a collaborative Literature Review (below).
The Exhibition: My Role(s)
Throughout the project, I had two jobs: Space Organizer and Introducer. As a space organizer, I had the job of figuring out where everyone and their stations were. With five different activity stations and nine different activity stations, this was not an easy job. We had the space of three classrooms to work with and 70 or so students fighting for space in it. Eventually, though, (with much negotiating and time), I was able to create a basic floor plan for everyone to follow and then a map of the space for visitors. I spent so many hours doing my best to make the map visually pleasing and understandable for our guests on exhibition night. The map is below.
My second role was as an introducer. This, I did with two other partners. Together, our job was to greet people as they entered the exhibition space and give them an overview of what the project is and what they are about to see in the exhibition. This was a tiresome job as there was so much to prepare. First and foremost, we had to create a brochure that had the map, overview, information about each station, and basically a guide to the whole exhibition. This was a struggle as there are not that many programs we can use to make it so we had to manually construct it using Adobe Illustrator. Then, we had trouble with printing out the brochures since they needed to be front and back. Eventually, though, we came through and our brochures turned out to be a great help for the visitors to our exhibition. Below, you can see the basic front and back of the three-paneled brochure we created.
Our next biggest challenge was to make our station visually pleasing and welcoming for guests. We printed out photos of the process, created posters with the map and created a welcome sign. The problem was, that our space was such an awkward shape and we had little ideas of how to fill it. There was lots of frustration as we tried to organize things to fit and look nice at the same time. In the end, we were successful and our space turned out nice. Our third task took place, of course, on the exhibition night. As introducers, we had a lot of talking to do and not too much time for it. This meant we had to be organized and precise. For this, we created a basic script that would outline what we needed to say to the guests. Surprisingly, this actually net fairly smoothly. Together, we wrote the script and then, on the night of, we had little trouble delivering information to our interested audience, despite the fact that our mouths became very dry and our throats sore.