Stone Soup

About “Stone Soup” this story, I heard it long time ago when I was a little child in Hong Kong.  The memory is kind of still in my head but cannot remember what is the whole story.  This is so amazing that Dr. Housefield brought this concept to the lesson and asked us to do it during the class.  Through the experience of making the work with my team members, I found it should be a good training to make us have a calm and quickly responsive mind when facing a pile of chaos.   Just like the plot of the story, everyone brought different “ingredient” to the “soup and saw how the soup would become afterward. 

Stepped out the big lecture hall and sat on a carpet of green grass, my team members and me started to take out what we had brought from our bags.  Most of the stuffs that appeared in my eyes were art materials like colored papers, color pens, white glue, and paints, etc. It made me have a doubt that did I bring the wrong things?  I was the only one who looked like a garbage collector to bring the recycle stuffs to the team.  When we were watching those stuffs, we started our brainstorming of how to use the paper plates, wire, wool, stickers with “moving eyeball”, and my packing boxes.  I could not remember who voiced out the idea first about to make a robot first, and he has named Francois.  He is shy and artistic, and he is waiting for a dating who will never show up.  Surprisingly, the members had a very quick response to my packaging.  They made two of boxes became Francois’s torso and used an egg package to be his eyes.  Someone twisted a wire into a pair of glasses and stuck a pair of the moving eyeball on his eyes.  Branches were his arms and legs, and we also help him to dress up with the colored papers.  Within an hour only, Francois already had his own clothes and shoes.  At the end, we also gave him a pretty top hat and put it above his paper plate face. 

It was a very special experience to me, because I had found something about myself through the event.  Compared with the American, they more dare to try something, so they have no doubt when doing things and don’t need to spend too much time for thinking.  This is a good mirror to me for improving my flaw.  After we visited around for other team’s masterpieces, we took a photo with Francois.  Although we spent an hour for a piece, we still need to say goodbye and dismantled it before we left.