This last Wednesday, the class had an interesting day that isn’t typical for any English class.
I, in particular, had a pretty fun day. My group was brainstorming on Monday ideas we could use with the MaKey MaKey. Jared had the idea to use it with an etch-a-sketch and draw things using fruit or any other conductive object.
When we first plugged our fruit in, we were having trouble with the wires and we suspected our fruit was unconductive (this was purely comedic, we knew the fruit was conductive). Jared even yelled out “UGH! Unconductive fruit, THE WORST!”
Eventually we were able to make our unconductive fruit work with our MaKey MaKey and we found a program online that used basic arrow key functions and we used this software to make online etch-a-sketches. Eden at this point had the idea of creating our own maze with the etch-a-sketch program.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make our own maze because it proved too difficult using the etch-a-sketch program and we found a maze online that we could do with the MaKey MaKey.
This maze incorporated a rat trying to find its way through the maze to get to a slice of cheese at the end of the maze. When we got to the cheese, Jared happily yelled out “We got the Gouda!”
This entire day got me thinking about the writing process of writing an essay. The maze aspect of it was very relative to my own struggles as a writer. I always feel when I have trouble writing a good thesis, that the rest of the paper is practically a maze. I definitely felt this way about our first paper. I had to revisit it several times before handing it in and will most likely end up redoing it after I get it back. In the maze, we ended up taking wrong turns at some points and had to go back, and that was very reflective of how I did my paper with different drafts.
All in all, I think paper 1 was definitely a difficult maze for all of us. The writing of a paper that has such freedom of thesis associated with it is not easy for those of us who are used to having a set topic. Hopefully, with much practice, I will improve my abilities to write freely about any thesis I choose in the future.