Almost Done!

It hard to believe that this is the last weekend of our trip! This week was one of the best I've had since we got to Prague because we had the Prague Pursuit on Tuesday. Despite the rain, we suited up in the morning not too sure about what all this adventure around the city would entail. Many of the questions bridged the gap between the topics we had covered in our class with the different things we had encountered around Prague in the pasts weeks. Once we received our list of questions and problems, we immediately went to work trying to decipher what place in Prague each question was referring to. Although most of the questions took some time to figure out, the most challenging part in my opinion was the section of pictures that we had to locate and recreate. Some of the pictures were of statues and famous works of art that we had already encountered, so we knew where they were; however some of them were much more obscure. Many times after we found one of these more obscure statues, someone on our team would remark that "you really wouldn't have seen this unless you were looking for it". This brought me back to second week of class when we discussed selective attention, and how we learned that unless a teacher directs a student's attention to certain things, they may never pick up on it. One of the other topics that we spent quite a bit of time discussing was working memory and how it can easily become overloaded. If someone were to attempt to do the Prague Pursuit by themselves they would quickly become overwhelmed because their working memory wouldn't be able to handle deciphering the questions, finding the pictures, and navigating to each location at the same time. By working as a team we were able to spread out the tasks so that no one person got overwhelmed. Every person on our team focused on a different aspect of the Prague Pursuit, and as a result we were much more efficient at figuring out and finding each location that the questions referred to. Prague Pursuit gave us a great opportunity to explore the city and see some things we would probably have never seen otherwise!