Instead of looking out on the world we looked in on ourselves in this project. This project taught us about the biases be it implicit or explicit that we endorse every day as well as the internal struggles called psychic prisons that rule us and prevent us from doing things in life. We started by learning about implicit bias by taking tests that assessed our preference or bias against certain groups of people. You can choose from many tests to take at the website implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html and see where you score. Implicit bias isn't necessarily something that is your fault, it might grow from exposure to media or influences from the opinions of people in your life as you grew up but the first step to fixing it is acknowledging that you have it and so that is why we took the tests. We went on trips to senior living centres to talk to residents about their experiences and ask questions that we formulated that related back to our project. Our main writing piece for this project was a narrative about how to escape a psychic prison. We took some time to think about the psychic prisons that hold us back and how we might try to escape them and then we started the writing process by writing a rough rough draft of our piece. It was a rough rough draft because it was basically just our ideas and there was very little format. We then polished it into our rough draft that had more of a format and style but there was still much to be done before it sounded nice and it was properly written. We did peer review of our pieces to refine how it flowed and if it inspired the reader. This really was an interesting experience because we not only had to recognize a psychic prison that we had but we also had to try to find a way to solve it in order to write the piece.
The design and setup for the final escape rooms was my favorite part of the project. We worked implicit biases into our puzzles in hopes of fooling and simultaneously educating the guests and it worked far better than a lot of us had expected. everyone I talked to was so engaged in that exhibition and guests were eager to learn what we had been learning for the past weeks.