Practice Test of Challenge 1

So on Wednesday we had to go out and practice our ideas for Challenge 1, moving an object across the campus without touching it. We'd spent a good amount of time discussing this back on Monday, and we thought we'd come up with a pretty good idea, but to save the security of our exact idea, we only brought part of our gear for this Challenge, so I wondered if we'd be able to pull it off. We had to go buy a last minute item from the book store, but besides that, everyone had been able to bring what we needed.

Setting up our post, I waited with a sign and tried to attract attention. Thankfully I have experience with sign waving and attracting attention (Thank you Halloween store work experience!) so I certainly didn't lack in the "strange looks from passer-bys" department. Matt hung off to the side, keeping a watch on the scenario and trying to decide if doing a 'demonstration' would help at all, while Athena circled around taking tons of great photos, and Dyo watched over our extra gear.

After what seemed like a good while we finally started getting a few people who read the sign I had, with mixed results. Some folks saw the sign and walked off in the opposite direction, but most of the people who did take the time to read the sign as they walked past either had an awkward smile or actually started chuckling. Apparently the idea of what we were asking was funny? Athena really seemed to enjoy watching the reactions of the people passing by, so she got some great video clips.

Eventually we got someone who was interested enough to try out our challenge, and even put up with my pantomiming to show him how to do everything. He was an older man with his wife, but she got a phone call so he decided to play along with us while she was on the phone, and play he did! We all LOVED his reactions to the game! We were only testing getting from one side of the square to the other, and yet he took our object the entire way across, and really seemed to enjoy himself while doing it. After that we had another two people who took our object all the way across the square; and later when we relocated to going from the fountain to the library, we got a few more people to take us part of the way each time.


All in all, this was a wonderful experience, with a lot of very exciting and rewarding moments. I was blown away by the enthusiasm of some of the people who played along with us, some even going so far as to say that they wanted to make sure they found us on Monday when we do this for real. I can't wait to get the rest of our gear together and do this for real on Monday.

I hope everyone has a good weekend and is ready to go on Monday!

Here's one of my favorite pictures from our practice session. This guy was a champ!