For my Idea Farming Project, I worked with Peter Sears, Anton Nguyen, Vivian McDivit, Brandon Loo, and Zackary Hernandez to achieve a goal of making Mr. Baratti happy. The first step was to list any needs that we could think of. We did this while reading Night. 

After we finished our list/reading, we chose one of the needs and used it as the base for the “Cow Pie Kitchen” assignment.  Anton, Vivian, and I chose “courage”, and we thought of as many bad ideas as we could for how to be courageous. Some of my favorites were “fight the biggest dude on campus”, “talk back to Mr. Orme”, and “be Devan and Harry in Mr. T’s class”. Also, we decided to make our “connecting image” a lion in reference to The Wizard of Oz and the Cowardly Lion. 

Even though we created bad ideas for the need of courage, we ended up deciding to go with the need of happiness. Thus, “Bliss for Baratti” was created. As a group, we decided to keep our letters lowercased in our “share out” slide to maintain the theme. We wanted to make our theme playful and a bit childish because that reminds us of happiness.

The “Bliss for Baratti” idea did not come easily. At the very beginning, our group wanted to recreate a scene/make a parody of The Breakfast Club. We had all seen and enjoyed the movie, and it would fulfill needs of happiness, entertainment, and unity. However, we soon discovered that our schedules didn’t line up in order to have enough time to film and prepare, so we had to think of something else. I believe Peter came up with the idea to create an appreciation video for Mr. Baratti, and the rest of the group quickly jumped on board.

Once the plan was all set, the one problem we face was getting students from Mr. Baratti’s first period to send in videos. Although we had asked Mr. Williams to announce our request to first period, we didn’t receive any submissions. We messaged the AP Euro Facebook, and no one replied to that either! Since all six of us are in Mr. Baratti’s second period, we were able to film clips during class, but we didn’t get that opportunity with first period. In the end, we were still able to pull together enough videos to make Mr. Baratti a nice video to end off the year. 🙂

Mr. Baratti’s Appreciation Video

I believe that the video turned out great, but if we could go back in time, I probably would announce our request to the AP Euro students earlier so that they had more time to send in submissions.