Perfectly Plentiful Proficient Practical Perilous Pompous Perplexing Pivotal Peculiar Project Drafts

by Lily Harner and Aiden Morgan

The Process of Ideas

How do you even come up with good ideas? It’s definitely a process. Since many of the projects at Gov School are group projects; we often bounce our half-baked ideas around each other, and end up with around a million semi-great ideas. We play around with them, and eliminate the weak ones. Then, it’s pretty much a toss-up for which idea we choose. Often, we go with the wittiest ideas, but they need to work as well. In the end, we get an idea that may not be perfect, but is pretty close.

Oftentimes, we start on an idea, but it turns out to be too complicated, too much work, or just completely terrible. Case in point: the “Day in the Life of a Hominin” project. We were tasked with doing a creative project highlighting the day of a humanoid creature that lived in the Middle Paleolithic (a perfect example of the interdisciplinary projects at Gov School!), and my group decided to do an epic poem. The first draft was more of an epic failure than an epic poem. The rhyming structure was awful, and the plot didn’t make sense. We both realized that, and the next day, we pretty much trashed most of the original idea. The next draft was much better (it involved a prehistoric duck).

The draft of the “Day in the Life of a Hominin” project, compared to the final product.

Ideas for research

Gov School student: I easily decided exactly what I wanted to research on the first try with no struggle… Said no one ever, except Aiden, but he’s an outlier. The rest of us mere mortals spent days coming up with ideas that didn’t even work out in the end.

Most people took almost a whole week to come up with their research idea. The teachers so graciously set aside a week for us to brainstorm topics, and many students were very grateful. Some took longer than a week, and some are currently trying to settle on an idea.

Many others settled on an idea, stuck with it for about a month, then realized that it would not work out and had to change their topic. Some ideas were just too complex. One MRGS student said, “I thought of a more complex idea that allowed a robot to identify objects in an image, but it was definitely outside of what I could accomplish.” In other words, it is perfectly fine to scrap an idea if it doesn’t work out.

Wacky Tangent Ideas

So many ideas are thought of that definitely are out-of-bounds of the project. Since the atmosphere at Gov School is so light and relaxed, we like to go for the funniest ideas to debate first, and eventually, those typically lead back to the main point.

For example, for the Data Expo Project, a huge amount of ideas were tossed around in class. Since the project description was vague, we were able to come up with statistical questions like “How long does it take for people to notice they’re being stared at, and do they notice faster when more people stare at them?” Eventually, these ideas spark more realistic ideas and we end up with exciting projects.

However, we definitely have some interesting unused tangent ideas. Here are a few: “How long will it take people to notice someone is missing if we convince them to hide in a closet,” “What if there is a van that drives around and forcibly helps people by grabbing them and giving them medical assistance,” or “Who would win the hunger games match between the students?” (Obviously, these are not good ideas and were come up with when someone was very, very bored).

It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

It may be cheesy, but it’s true. We learn a lot through the processes of development. Nobody’s perfect, so don’t expect to come up with an amazing idea in the first minute. You have to sort through all the millions of bad ideas to come up with a good one. From the trial-and-error process, you can learn what works, and what doesn’t, and become a better student through your mistakes.