Blue: Quantifying Experience

How do you quantify experience?This question came up several weeks ago as I was consulting with a member of the Violet Band about her project. It's an interesting question... sometimes you embark on a project that produces a physical thing: a plant, a paper, a mechanism, or sculpture. Other times, the product of a journey is not so quantifiable: research, question asking, iteration, thinking, or practice. Each of the Blue Band's projects are a combination of these two disparate categories -- concrete and abstract -- and that combination is so difficult to quantify.So, what happens when, at the end of the journey, you have to make a presentation to the whole school that justifies how you chose to spend the last five weeks?The answer? Documentation. And, documentation can look much different for different projects.For example, it can be a time lapse of 60 minutes of pixel pushing. It can also mean taking the same photo everyday for several days to measure progress. Documentation can be a SketchUp design that later manifests into a wooden structure. Or asking a friend to record some off the wall afternoon testing. Documentation can take the form of detailed to-do lists. Or, taking photos of specimens... or photos of the thing you built in order to take consistent photos of specimens. All the notes that lead up to the final thing can also help to quantify all the abstract time and ideas and brainstorming that go into the manifestation of a final product. While possibly cliche, it's important to point out that despite the emphasis on a final project or a final presentation, the emphasis of experiential learning is indeed the experience -- the journey and not necessarily the destination.As we continue to document this week, next week, we will start to map that journey and convert it into a story we share with the rest of the world.Only 12 days left, Blue!