Relax and Have a Math Test

When I decided to have my participants feel back to kids, I thought about several directions of what the experiences can be: feeling like at home when your parents read stories before you go to sleep; go to a fairground at weekend; have a birthday party with your friends, and finally I decided to make an experience about going back to school as a k-2nd student.

For the set up, I bought a desk and a pair of chair which are designed for little kids, hope that my participants can feel the difference between sitting in that tiny chair and a sitting in a normal chair like we have in our classroom. At first, I also want to have a scent of classroom and a projector showing a real classroom, but after the test, I found it is difficult to create a scent in such a short time, the smelling is so weak that people can barely notice, and it is hard to set up a projector on that tiny table or project the right size image bypass the surrounding people. So I used sound as background "music" instead of smelling and projection. There is a 10 minutes record of a first grade classroom, some kids are talking to each other, teacher is shouting at someone, you can also hear some kids are running, but all of these sounds are blurry, it is hard to get what they are actually talking about. Just like in the real situation, (maybe just for me)I can not get the content of surrounding people talking when I am doing something carefully.

There are three parts of experiencing, after each experience, each participant can get a sticker like "excellent" "good job" or a shining star.
               
1. extremely easy math worksheet (first grade level), provided with #2 pencil

 

2. a book of playful game: fill in letters/ count numbers/ color, provided with crayon

3. copy the letters and numbers on a sheet of wide ruled paper 

I think it is a fun experience when you as a adult to do something very easy with no challenge at all, you can see some people are going to do this seriously, but some of them really like to do that in a creepy way like 1+2=4 or write the letters "ugly" like what a kid will do when he first learn how to write. It remind me my age of 5, at least, when I see the little chair and the worksheet!