This is a small addendum to my last post, “Inspiration” Scavenger Hunt Exercise for Teaching Thesis. I meant to post this back in May but it slipped my mind, and I remembered once I started planning for the fall!
In my Thesis class at Parsons BFADT, I have a rare situation in that I teach largely the same group of students in the spring as the fall. That has a lot of advantages, but a disadvantage is that I can’t repeat any material! So I couldn’t re-playtest the ‘Scavenger Hunt’ exercise, since everyone had already done it. But I was able to gather some subtler data.
Verifiable Enrichment
This exercise is predicated on the same assumption that underlies many classroom exercises, and even education more generally: that rehearsing an activity in the safe environment of a classroom will better equip people for later doing those things for ‘real’.
In this instance, the idea of this exercise was to introduce some activities to arts students that would be creatively enriching in some way, in the hope that it would filter back into their Thesis work. As an exercise, I think it was a success, going off of the student response and the immediate impact it had on the class. But did it… you know… actually do anything? Were the students enriched?
It’s hard to tell. But, I figured I could get a small small pulse-check by asking.
Follow-up Survey
Just to review the audience and timeline here, these were students who in the Fall of 2025 were in my class and did the ‘Inspiration Scavenger Hunt’ exercise that semester. Then, they went on to complete their Thesis work over the following semester of Spring of 2026. (A minor note: It’s actually 15 of the original 18 students, as 3 went to other sections for the spring. And 1 student missed the survey. So my survey population is 14 of the original 18, which is still pretty good! You normally don’t get many opportunities for this sort of follow-up.)
So, at the very end of the semester (after their final presentations), I sent around a small survey about the course, which I usually do. But I also added a section asking them about some familiar activities:
These are the same 15 activities from the scavenger hunt of course, which at that point were a distant memory from the previous semester. They chuckled a bit as they recognized that.
The “Maybe” answer was phrased as “Sort of / arguably / maybe”, because these students had liked arguing for particular outings to ‘count’ for something or not. I didn’t want them to pause mid-survey and ask, “Does it count if I did [xyz]?”. Instead I just explained, if you don’t feel the answer is a “Yes!”, but it could be argued you did it in some way, then put Maybe. It’s the honor system anyway.
The survey design here couldn’t be simpler: I’m just trying to see if they, of their own accord this time, did any of the same things I had (implicitly) asked them to do the prior semester.
Survey Results
I want to admit that I actually had a real pit in my stomach asking them this, and I almost chickened out. But I resigned to it and steeled myself for the results I was afraid to see: A wall of “No” responses.
As in, I feared that maybe students were willing to go and do some of these things with the active encouragement of a professor and the surrounding structure of a game, but that doing so didn’t have any lasting impact or change their behavior. I prepared myself to be disappointed, and to think through revisions for the assignment.
But, oh ho ho, their answers surprised me:
They… actually did it, they did all the things! Even though there was no game, no structure of reporting back, nothing like that all, it seems that all semester long they were going out and doing these things all on their own!
A small caveat: The wording on the survey is a bit broader for some tasks than it was in the game version (eg. simply going to a library, versus needing to book a 1-on-1 appointment), so it isn’t completely analogous, I know.
There’s something interesting comparing it to the original results too:
In almost every instance, more students did the activity in the 2nd semester than in the first, sometimes substantially more. And when fewer people did it, it was only ever by a single person. That’s without even counting Maybe votes! And it’s even more of an advantage to the Spring because the class was smaller as well (14 students, of 18 in the Fall).
I think some the explanation for this is that it’s capturing the students who were doing these activities anyway but didn’t participate in the game version. But it could also represent some positive influence!
And if you’re me, you’d probably like to see the distribution of answers too. Like, maybe there’s a few students who answered “No” to everything, and a couple who did everything, and so the totals aren’t giving us the full picture. Here’s what that looks like:
So this is saying, there were two students gave x4 “Yes” answers, there was one student who gave x6 “Yes” answers, and so on. The most common result is 8 (out of 15 activities), and the maximum is 12. But would you look at that, the minimum is 4 “Yes!” answers. Every single student did at least a few of the activities. Whoa!
What Does It All Mean?
I was very surprised by the results (and then, maybe not so surprised), since they’re certainly higher than I was expecting (/fearing).
There are a lot of ways to interpret these results. It could be that students learned the value to their creative practice of going out and exposing themselves to the world, and so they made permanent changes to their behavior. Or, it could be that they were already doing all these things anyway, and resented the hokey scavenger game during the fall. Or, they could’ve just been lying in their answers so I wouldn’t feel bad. Or some combination thereof. Who knows exactly, it’s hard to say. Importantly though, it is not all “No”s. That would be a definitive result, and one that I would interpret as a negative outcome.
This is all a very small sample of course, so there’s nothing definitive here. But as a playtest, I couldn’t ask for better! As always, I find that whenever I really put trust in students- and I mean really put trust in them, where there’s real risk- they always meet and exceed that trust. Makes ya think.
Leave a Reply