Winter Exhibition 2018

For this Winter Exhibition, which PLP does every year, we had to create and immersive room using chemistry, a theme, and a story. Now you may be wondering how all these things can become linked and made into a project. Let me explain.

In Science we had been learning about chemistry, specifically ionic and covalent bonds. An ionic bond is between a metal and a nonmetal. The nonmetal attracts the metal, and the metal donates its electron to the nonmetal. In a covalent bond is between two nonmetals of the same electronegativity and they share the electrons in their outer orbits.

To try to understand these bonds a little better, we made “Chemistry Stories” to demonstrate how the bonds work. Our Chemistry Stories were animated short films using relationship stories to explain the bonding. Here is the one I did with Jackson and Sam:

 

We were then paired with another team to present our Chemistry Stories for the Winter Exhibition. We were paired with Amelia and Lucy In Amelia and Lucy’s story, the atoms are characters in a romance story, and electrons are represented by money. The money is borrowed, representing a covalent bond. We combined this with our story where the electron “money” was stolen, representing an ionic bond.

This combined story was made into an immersive experience room where the audience becomes part of the story in a room that looks like it is from the story. To help get us in the groove to understand an immersive experience, we took a trip to an escape room. An escape room is a room that you are in from a story you are told, and you have to use things from the room to solve a mystery and escape. Our escape room was a scary escape room and the actor that was in our room to help guide us did a very good job of making it seem real and scary. We tried to emulate this experience to solve the mystery of who stole the electron money.

This is where the theme comes in. Each group was given a regular classroom to transform into our immersive experience room. We had the textiles room. We made our room look like a Gala, or high school ball. Each of us was a character in the story at the ball and acted out a part to guide visitors through the mystery. To try to get people to come to our gala, Lucy gave out tickets to the gala as people were arriving to the Exhibition. When people entered our gala, they watched a video explaining the story and the theft of the electrons/money. They were then guided to solve different puzzles in order to solve the mystery of who stole the money. Here are the pictures of our room.

While it was a lot of work and a full day spent setting up, it was a really fun project. Learning about and creating an immersive experience was intriguing and a fun. I can understand why escape rooms have become popular as an activity. Our room came together really well and we got a lot of positive feedback that people really felt like they were at a gala. While people seemed to be able to follow the story and mystery, I think we could have explained our plot a little bit better. Overall though, it was a success.