Session 3: Treasure

Realized nobody blogged on Session 3. Well I was preparing for the treasure hunt stuff so I could only attended the treasure hunt game. But I did hear some stuff from Minghui & the rest so I will write those down too. Please do add on/correct me though.

Walk the plank (Have you ever?)

The facilitator will ask some questions.If the question applies to the student and he/she can answer yes to the question, you move one space to your right and stand in that square. If the question does not apply to the student and therefore he/she cannot answer yes to the question, the student stay in the square where he/she was at.

Some students move to be with their friends, not because that question apply to them. The girls tended to move in groups.

Some students move more than one square at a time, i.e Emmanuel - who started counting off the no. of ball games he played and moved that many squares when asked the question "do you like to play ball games?"

Not sure if anyone did the data collection here, because I think we do not have enough facilitators down.

Shark Attack!

The game is supposed to have students forming a inner and outer circle back facing each other, with the students in the inner circle facing inwards. A catcher will be outside the 2 circles to grab someone from the outer circle, without the inner circle person knowing. Once the inner circle realized his/her partner is snatched, he/she must chase after them to stop the snatching.

The students improvised on the game by holding hands, hence they will definitely know that someone stole their partner, which defeats the purpose of the game. Also some of them dont want to sabo their friends so refused to snatch anybody.

Manage to catch the last part of this game when Shaun demonstrated to the students how easy/fun the game can be, even introducing 2 catchers. I think that got more students being interested in the game.


Treasure Hunt

Words with team numbers are pasted all over the classroom. Facilitator will read out a question and students have to find the correct answer/team number to that question. Students should work in team.

For this game, I think it would have been a good data collection source except that it wasn't executed very well. I think that more briefing should be given to the facilitators by the planning team. Also I felt that we didn't explain clearly the rules of the game to the students too.

The game should have been executed such that each team is only to submit one answer. However, I think Shaun wasn't clear on that and ended up saying 'correct answer'/'wrong answer' to every kid who went up to him with the paper. So the game started with a mad rush to get any paper to show Shaun, and when the word 'correct' was uttered, every group started to find that word. Hence resulting in skewed data, because that would mean every group knew the knowledge by submitting the 'right' answer.

The game was changed after the 3rd word, such that the students now know that they can only submit one word. However, due to the previous rounds, instead of working in teams to find the correct answer, they still came up one by one hoping to get the 'right' answer. Hence I think the game result is not very useful in establishing the student’s level of knowledge and awareness towards various health related information (initial objective of the game).


Other issues

Communications within ourselves
As the observer and sometimes being involved in planning, I feel that a lot of time we did not planned sufficiently by going down to the nitty gritty. As such during the session we often have to ask each other questions about the activities, which reflect bad on us. I mean when the treasure game was wrong, I had to inform Shaun about that and hence the game was changed halfway which made the students confused and gave them the idea that we did not planned properly (which was true). I feel that this also serve as an important learning point that we should coordinate more among ourselves.

That was why in the session planning for session 4, I (and I think minghui also) were so bent on getting a lot of the details right. I know some of us are comfortable with just knowing the rough activities we are going to do, and then execute them as they like when the time comes. I know that we should be flexible, but when the objective of the game and what the facilitator does runs opposite, I think our communication with each other needs to be improved.

I do know that every thing was planned in a rush, with many people going away/falling sick when session 3 was planned. Sorry to be such a nag. It's good that we no longer have a back-to-back session ^^

Late issue
I think Mas was very unhappy with us on Tuesday when at 7.30am we were still at the tables preparing for the session. Minghui pointed out the sessions all did not start on time from the first session on. Think if we have more things to prepare, we need to prepare early and also not be late (yes I am very guilty of being late). So I think we must try to start the session on time from now on.