Looking back on the past three months, Reva and
I conducted a mostly successful 20 time project centered around
the fun theory, and although we do not have a physical product, the conclusions
we produced allow us to educate others on our discoveries. Through our
experiments that caused people to throw more trash away via a basketball hoop
over a garbage can and making written schoolwork more fun by writing with
"fun pens" we discovered the core of our classmate's motivation to do
things. Although we based all of our experiments off the fun theory, we ended
up discovering more about what motivates the human brain in our twenty-first
century society.
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| Data from our trash basketball hoop experiment |
As shown from this bar graph, the days we had a
basketball hoop over the trashcan (shown in the orange), the more trash was
thrown away. People were motivated by the thrill of making disposing litter a
game. Recently, in a conversation, I heard about an article written on the
subject of new start-up companies hiring specialists to come in and recommend
ways to motivate their millennial generation employees. I was able to provide
insight in this subject because of our results from our 20 time project. I now know
that today's millennials and generation z are not motivated by seeing results,
like the baby-boomer generation before them, because our society has technology
that produces those results for us and the work positions most commonly found
today require the critical thinking behind the producing job of technology. Our
most recent generations are motivated by intrinsic motivation: the desire to do
things because they are important and/or we have a passion for them. This was
the core of our TED talk.
Aside from a few improvements, I feel like our
TED talk was successful in getting our message across while still keeping it
engaging the entire time. Designing our attention-getter to have props and
adjust the focus of the presentation from the right side of the classroom to
the left right from the start, I felt, was highly affective. One part we could
improve in our presentation was the speed. As most people find is usually the
case, when actually presenting, people tend to go much faster than they did in
their practice presentations. Our original time for our practice runs was a
constant 5min 30sec, however for our actual presentation when we were aware
that we were slightly over the time limit, we sped up, causing our talk to end
up being 4min 18sec. It might have been difficult for our audience to
contemplate everything we were saying when introducing new ideas in such a
hurried manner. From this TED talk, I have learned that once all the
preparation is complete and you know the time and rhythm for your talk, once
you are actually standing in front of the class with your heart racing, it's
important to take it steady, relax, and just mentally remind yourself that
you're there to teach the class. It's helpful to consciously try to make the
information you're presenting to sound fresh, like you're saying it all for the
first time, because the audience is hearing it for the first time. I think this
mental technique can make your talking slower and you're ideas sound more authentic
and passionate. From this TED talk I can actually take something away directly
from our project: when presenting, or doing anything in life, find a way to
make yourself passionate and care about the topic to both make your
presentation engaging and make your life accomplishments more genuine.
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