Neuro Week was the manifestation of the ideas that were expressed throughout the entire quarter in the class. The goal was to teach, rechannel energy, and uplift the mood of the upper school before exams, by pushing students to complete challenges relating to six types of intelligence and influence them to use their brains in a way that they may not usually.

When the idea of the nine types of intelligence was introduced we planned to focus on all nine and we divided them up according to the ones people wanted to research and create challenges for. Bodily-kinesthetic and existential intelligence were mine, and I started by trying to understand each intelligence. Bodily-kinesthetic was easy to understand but difficult to create a challenge for, as I went through multiple different ideas such as passing around a ball and building structures like towers with blocks or Legos or maybe even building a brain. In the end, I decided to scrap the challenge altogether, because I personally was not able to find a way to have this intelligence manifest in a challenge that only one person could complete. Existential intelligence came easier, I quickly came up with ideas of ways to execute this challenge. Throughout the process, multiple changes were made to the way that it was carried out, from ideas to drawing in some sand, to drawing on a chalkboard inside of a structure, to just drawing on a chalkboard.

When first starting this process, I was not expecting this to be a project where we knew where we would end up, though the idea of not having a definite and set project was a bit unsettling. When we began brainstorming ideas, they were incredibly outside of the box, which I was not used to. We thought of ideas dealing with VR and came up with ideas incorporating the entire campus. We were urged not to be confined by logistics at that moment in time, which was strange but also good to experience. Our project gained significance by us doing Neuro Week on the entire school. Because our class is titled “Neuroplasticity and Communication” we finally got to the Communication part by executing our project. Letting students partake in the challenges we created not only gave us perspective on giving information to a large number of people and helped us to understand how our peers may think, but it also helped them to learn a little bit more about their own brains. All throughout the week students (and a teacher) came in to complete the challenges with many of them partaking in the existential and interpersonal challenge. Even after doing the challenge once, students learned something new, and not just about neuroplasticity. The sticky notes that we asked them to fill out are filled with ideas about how intelligence works such as “It isn’t finite”.

Looking back at this project, one thing that I would most definitely change is the way we showed that students had learned. Originally we had planned to do a giant art piece involving push pins and yarn that would manifest in the quad, but this was a part of the plan to have the project take place in the quad. I still believe that the art project would have been a fun and cool thing to do because people who didn’t participate in the challenges would see it, and people who did would continue to increase their brains neuroplasticity. And though our project did not conclude in the way we originally planned, the way that it did end perfectly described this class and our project. Something that was never set in stone, yet still resulted in a fair success.