Now Showing: HONRS 227
Only in the Honors Program could you find a class like Honors 227: Investigating Deception through Games, Film, and TV.
It would be unique just for the student-created twists on popular movie trailers. Add to that the game design projects, the class Encyclopedia of BS (Biases and Sophism), and the critical thinking about interdisciplinary deception, and you’ve got a near-perfect Unexpected Connections course.
Honors 227 is the result of the combined brainpower of Drs. Derek Hansen and Jeff Parkin. Dr. Hansen is a cybersecurity guru, with a specialization in human/computer interaction. He puts the “game” in “Games, Film, and TV.” Jeff Parkin is a filmmaking professor from Theatre and Media Arts. He’s the pro in screenwriting and directing. Together, their class fulfills the GE requirements for Social Science and Arts.
“[Jeff] is one of my favorite collaborators,” Dr. Hansen said. “As we brainstormed topics for the class, we thought that one of the challenges of our time is people being deceived. We decided to address it head on. The class is about how to identify ways that people are deceived.”
“After all,” Dr. Parkin said, “There's a lot of deception today. We've got conspiracy theories, fake news, disinformation…. it’s really easy to be persuaded by things that aren't true.”
One of the ways students learn to protect themselves is through a multifaceted understanding of deception. Class TA Adam Bonny said that the biggest interdisciplinary connection in Honors 227 is “probably the crossover between film and social sciences. Particularly the way that you analyze a film is not far from the way you'd analyze an argument. You look for logical fallacies, for a thesis, and for how they're giving evidence.”
Not only is the topic of deception strongly relevant to students, but the professors have also worked hard to develop a class format that is engaging and energizing. “Each [assignment] has a pretty specific focus…. They kind of alternate back and forth between making films and making games,” said Jeff.
Honors 227 is held in a huge-windowed, colorful classroom on the fourth floor of the HBLL. Honors student EJ Smith said, “Often, there are students in the hall watching through the windows, looking at what we’re studying. I have people that’ll ask when we get out what class that was.”
The first big assignment for class was a student favorite—everyone partnered up and created their own trailer for a popular movie. But these were trailers with a twist. To help students learn how easy it is to deceive through reframing, each partnership had to create a trailer that was totally different from the original movie genre. One example, Jeff said, would be “turning The Incredibles into a horror movie.” View another example below created by Josh Hanosek and Gavin Nelson for the course (used with their permission).
EJ and Emmie Hall were paired together for the trailer recut project. They chose to make a National Geographic-style trailer for the movie Madagascar 2. Emmie loved how they both “got creative in brainstorming what themes we wanted to use and how we were going to cut it. We [got to] incorporate our own unique individual perspective into a movie.” She loved becoming “besties with EJ!”
Because so much of the class has been centered on partnerships or group work, EJ said that “you become really good friends with people. You spend a lot of time editing and watching movies and writing reports [together].”
Now that the class has finished their movie trailers, they are moving on to assignments including designing games and filming documentaries. Students have also been working on a collective encyclopedia called “The Encyclopedia of BS (Biases and Sophism).” Each person is assigned an entry on a certain type of deception, which range from the “Abilene Paradox” to “Willful Ignorance.”
In the Encyclopedia of BS, one fun entry is “The IKEA effect,” which describes how we tend to place a higher value on products that we have helped create, regardless of their quality. Another is “Alphabet Soup,” in which people overuse acronyms to appear authoritative on a certain subject. The “Rosy Retrospective Bias” is pretty self-explanatory.
The class isn’t all fun and games, though, and students take the subject material seriously. Caleb Rogers said, “[We’ve come to] understand how filmmakers look at things as well as how society interacts, and what we can do as students, as people, and as disciple scholars to better live in the world.”
Although this is the last time that this version of Honors 227 will be offered, there's still a chance for us to get a sneak peek into the class.
At the end of the semester, Honors 227 will culminate in a game day, open to outside attendees and hosted by the students. Groups of students will design experiences from murder mysteries to card games to escape rooms, allowing them to test their knowledge of deception. Dr. Parkin opened the invitation: “We would love to have people come and participate!” Stay tuned for the details later this semester!