Whenever we completed a content chapter in Psychology, we created a video that outlined the chapter. These video would include all of the main topics from the chapter and would provide examples. At the end of the course, these videos were compiled into one full video that would summarize the entire Psychology course.

 

The purpose of this project was to create a series of videos that would serve as a way to prove to our teacher that we understood the content that we had learned in the last chapter.

 

Each chapter video was supposed to include the main ideas and studies from the chapter and were supposed to use a combination of video clips, images, and voiceovers to keep the viewer interested instead of just listening to a recorded lecture. (We all hate those.) Also, since we conducted our own experiments throughout the course, we had to include our experiments and our results in each video.

 

Traumatizing little kids for science is amusing no matter how many times you do it. For one of my psychology experiments, my partner and I attempted to classically condition Ms. Durkee’s middle school to expect a scary clown to scare them sometime during Ms. Durkee’s PowerPoint whenever there was a clown sign on the door. They never made the connection between the sign and the appearance of the scary clown, but we later found out that we had conditioned some of her students to expect a clown whenever Ms. Durkee used a PowerPoint, even when the experiment had ended.

 

The thing that caused me the most problems was that we did chapters 2 and 3 at the same time and there was a ton of information that we had to accurately convey in a short amount of time. I wanted to go into more detail on some parts of the content, but the video for chapter 2 and 3 together could only be 14 minutes long total so I had to leave out some details. Also, since there was so much content, trying to find images and examples that fit each idea nicely was time consuming.

 

We started by learning the content of each chapter in Psychology class and then once we were done with that, we created a video script that we would submit for peer critique so that we were certain that we had completed each requirement of the video. After completing the peer critique process, we took our scripts, revised them, and then used our scripts to create a rough draft video. We then had a second peer critique on the video themselves and finished by revising and publishing our videos.

 

The critique process was utilized throughout this project to make sure that our videos included all of the topics we were supposed to talk about and made sense to the viewer. Without the peer critique process, our videos would have been very poor in quality and would have so many errors that you would not want to watch them.

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Here are some additional questions that we answered for this specific teacher.

 

How did your understanding of ___________ (topic) develop as a result of completing this project OR unit?This project covered the entire span of the Psychology course, so I learned a lot through this project. I learned about how the mind prioritizes activities, how to train others through conditioning, and I found out why some of the teenagers in my scout troop still act like toddlers even though they are full grown.

 

What evidence generated by you can you provide to demonstrate the knowledge you gained through this project OR unit?In the Chapter 2 video, I talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is part of the system that the brain uses to prioritize which activities need to be done first.

 

What connections can you make between what you’ve learned through this project and other historical topics and/or time periods?Leadership- understanding how your audience is thinking helps the leader understand what needs to be done to get the group moving again. (Example: Hungry boy scouts are much less productive, so take a quick snack break and then go back to activity.)

 

How can the knowledge you’ve gained through this project be applied to other disciplines and connect to the real world?

 

The developmental psych chapter of the Psychology course helped me understand why some of the boys in my scout troop can be almost 14 and still be unable to do anything for themselves. Their brains have not caught up with what they were supposed to be able to do because their parents have taught them learned helplessness and so their brains are not developed in a way that allows them to function by themselves.

 

Creativity was a major factor in this project because each video needed to be unique and original if it was going to keep the viewers’ attention through the whole movie. Finding pictures and video clips that we liked, and then putting a spin on them so that they fulfilled a video requirement meant being creative in our interpretation of the images. (Using a picture of a bear trap baited with money as an example of an incentive was a good example of this.)

 

Creativity- taking what is given to you and combining it into a coherent object that fulfils the requirements while still keeping audience’s attention.