Wait... What?

We were completely lost when we read this blog. Create an exhibit. Ok, seems easy enough. What's all the other blabber for? Well, as it turns out, the Scrolls aren't real and we have to come up with a theory focused around these fake scrolls that might, perhaps, portray Rome as it was and possibly correlate it to the United States today...? Does that even sound right? We're not sure.... but we're making progress in A direction, whether it's the right one or not, we'll have to find out. The way we see it is, we can come up with whatever theory we want as long as it's plausible because it's completely ficticious as it is. I think at this point, it's best for us to assume some character roles, and play it out from there. I do love to act...

Problem Based Learning Experience #2

The Museum of Religious Antiquities in Bangkok would like to exhibit the Carthaginian Scrolls and the museum is looking for teams of skilled communicators knowledgeable in History, Religion, Architecture and Engineering, to create the exhibit.

The scrolls were discovered eleven years ago in the Catacombs of Rome, by three Argentinean archeologists. It was believed that the two well-preserved, but hitherto unknown, scrolls date from the early days of the Catholic Church. The scrolls were carbon-dated and it appeared they were written about 380 AD, just after Rome was sacked by the Vandals. The Roman Empire collapsed shortly thereafter.

The scrolls discuss in detail the many excesses of the Romans, concluding that their communal bathing habits and centrally-heated homes led to a moral laxness that the church needed to eradicate. The scrolls lay out a plan to eliminate all vestiges of Roman engineering and ingenuity from areas under its control.

From the historical record, we know that after the Fall of the Roman Empire, which many modern historians do attribute to a moral laxness and softening of will, Europe was plunged into a millennium-long dark age. The civilized world’s focus shifted to the Arab world where the arts and sciences flourished.

Many archeologists and historians believe that these scrolls are forgeries. They claim that they were created less than 15 years ago, to “show” that the Fall of the American Empire, and the movement of science and the arts to Asia, was due in large part to the US government becoming a Theocracy in 2015, banning research in biology, medicine and cosmology.

Board Game

Learning Experience #1

The purpose of our first learning experience, in a nutshell, was to create a way to get kids interested in learning about the Roman Forum. We came up with a board game, similar in concept to Cranium and trivial Pursuit (if you were to mix the two games together), in which the kids/students move around the board and try to answer one of each type of Question. Our topics were Art, History, Architecture and Construction, and Culture.

Although it may sound as if our initial assignment was straight forward and easy to figure out: It was not. I don't have the original PBL to post to show all my followers, but essentially, it was very open ended and it took a while before my group and I were able to figure out what exactly it was that the assignment was requesting we accomplish. After exploring our thoughts through tools like C-Maps and good old fashioned pen and paper, we discovered what our goal was. This was the longest process, and it was what our professors liked to refer to as "diverging".

The rest began to fall into place after we had a clear vision of what it was we wanted to accomplish. We had a very interesting and diverse group; majors varied from all over the UC Campus. I myself had the least useful major: Accounting. It didn't matter though, we each contributed in our own ways and successfully completed the project with almost no group issues, in my opinion. We worked very well together.

Welcome

Welcome! The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my discoveries about Roman Architecture, Construction, and Culture which I will learn through a course that I'm taking. The course culminates in a trip to Rome at the end of the quarter, and I will be documenting things I learn and discover along the way. Enjoy :)