Monkey See, Monkey Do?

To build upon the exercise that we attempted last week, we were assigned another seemingly simplex task today. Last time it was basically leading the blind through the obstacle course that is our school, but today we were left to lead each other in re-creating pictures that our teacher had cunningly whipped up for us. When we first heard the assignment it sounded like a breeze, until we actually saw the pictures that we would have to describe to our classmates. Full of geometric shapes, dimensions, lines, squiggles, and basically everything under the moon was attempted within these pictures.

Through group rotations everyone had the opportunity to experience the exercise from the leader's point of view and from that of the recipient who drew according to the leader's directions. The result of our pictures were especially dependent upon the cognitive skills (i'm not sure if cognitive's the word, but basically the individual's ability to translate and associate images with other images or words) of the leader, otherwise the entire picture just turned out as a big jumble. Still, to a certain extent, the assignment required a certain level of knowledge of each participant because often times in order to convey the picture many of us had to rely upon mathematical concepts like the unit circle and such. By the end of our exercise, most of the pictures we produced were relatively similar to that of the original.

Personally, when it came time to actually describe my picture to another classmate, I felt as though I recieved the most complicated example of all. Throughout the entire process you had to keep reiterating yourself in order to make sure that you and the "drawer" were on the same page. Though direction taking and giving probably isn't as complicated as this exercise, it once again emphasizes the specificity and detail required of all our directions in order to be able to translate an idea from our head onto the stage.

By the way, the first picture of each group represents the prescribed image that we were suppose to recreate from oral directions. The second picture of each group was my personal interpretation of the directions. And the last picture (the hardest one) was the one that I had to describe for another classmate.