The Exhibition Experience

In my opinion I think that the Exhibition was a great experience for me. I worked the hardest I had ever worked and learned so much. My whole project was made in one week. This means all the planning, the building and all the rehearsal was done in just 7 days. What made the huge task a little bit less stressful was the timeline we wrote. This timeline included what we would do on each day, what we would need to complete the daily task and how long we would work on it up until presentation day. Some other key factors in how much prep time we had was other variables like extra curricular activities, other homework and events. Unfortunately for me the week of the exhibition was one of the busiest weeks in a long time for me. I had a drama performance, 2 tests, and a lot of french homework. You may ask “Well, how did you do it?” Well, pure focus.

When we first did the brainstorming for ideas for our Blue Sky project, I was all over the place. I had 7 different topics that were all very broad. I wanted to do all of them because all of them were all equally interesting, so I blended 2 together. My 2 strongest topics were “animals adapting” and “global warming effects”. I really thought that I could create a project out of both of them. At this point, I couldn’t think of a way to mash the 2 topics together so I started thinking about how I would present my work. I thought about my strengths: art, design, math and science. Two passions really stuck out to me: art and design. To use both of these I could create a model. My model would have text and art pieces. Now I just had to go back and think about the question. I could incorporate the animals adaptations through clay or crafting supplies and show what makes them adapt through text and larger models. I wanted this model to be quite large so I drew it out. My model did not resemble this sketch in the end but that’s okay because its all part of a revision process.

Next I started building the model. This was defiantly not the easy part. My model had so many different pieces to it that I knew I would take a long time. So I started with a base. I figures that I cardboard piece would not be able to hold all of the heavy masses of clay so I used a wood slab instead. I painted half of it green and half of it blue. I wanted to show a couple ecosystems to make it more diverse. Then I realized I forgot a step. I completely skipped the most important part, the research. I spent a strong 3 days just researching effects, animals and adaptations. Once I chose 5 different animals to focus on I chose the effects that were going to cause them to adapt. I chose 5 more. Now that I could actually start building something, I went straight to work. I built a mini factory to represent a oil spills and air pollution out of toilet paper rolls and fake candle lights, A cut down forest out of cut in half wine corks and I showed sea level rise by building a sized down dike out of clay rocks. The animals I built out of Fimo, were placed in there ecosystem and part of the enviro was fine and the other half extremely polluted. Not all of the animals of species were shown adapted, but the closer they were placed to the hazard, you could see the more adapted they were. I put little mini signs with info about the hazard and adaptation beside each scenario. The last step I did was to figure out what I needed to say to people when they ask questions. I made sure I could answer every question that was related to my topic, display and idea. To help engage people when i wasn’t there I made a little short video on repeat on my iPad./ The bad part was that by the time my project was complete it was12:30am the night before.

When I came to school the next day, I carried 5 large bins along with me. This was excluding my project outside of a bin. In the bins there were many Christmas garlands and a miniature Christmas tree. My group’s theme was environment, so we tried to make it as earthy as possible. The hour before we spent decorating and making last minute changes. When the Exhibition was finally open a lot of people started coming through. It was really fun explaining my project to people because it something I am passionate about. I think that the presentation part went well except for the fact that I didn’t get to explain my project to many people because of running between being the door manager and my Minecraft project with Maggie.

Overall I think the Exhibition went just fine. Somethings I would do differently are spending more time to try and engage the audience and add audio to my video to make people actually notice it behind the display model. The whole experience was awesome because I had never participated in a science fair or something of that sort before. Moving on from the Exhibition I can take forward with me the feeling of accomplishment of my model (even if it took a strong 8 hours straight) and the building skill of time management.

I could not find any photos of me from the Exhibition, but I do have some of my project.