MAP students race across San Francisco, connect with peers

Armed with confidence, the desire to prove oneself and a map, 36 juniors in the Media Arts Program embarked on a race through downtown San Francisco on April 1 in a heated competition to finish various tasks and score the most points doing them.

Some of these missions included taking pictures of certain parts of the town, such as Nob Hill and Chinatown, while other tasks involved riding the trolley or cable car. There were mandatory tasks and optional tasks where teams could compete for extra points; the group who earned the most points would win the race. The winning team this year was Derek Makeever's group, who had the most accumulated points at the end of the trip.

“I thought the trip would be kind of boring, since only 11 kids were going,” junior Ali Kothari said. “But instead, we got to do a lot more and I got to know everyone on the trip.”

Regardless of the unusual nature of this field trip, junior Jocelyn Takahashi learned quite a lot.

“We had to visit and take pictures of historically significant things—plaques, the old mint, a Wells Fargo bank that had an exhibit on the history of Wells Fargo, the gates on the edge of Chinatown and statues,” Takahashi said.

The purpose of this field trip was to connect all the MAP juniors, who are all in different electives this year, and push them to give an artistic and creative spin to history by taking artistic shots and learning about the significance of the subject of their picture(s).

The challenging part of the race was not the assignments the students had to complete, but rather the physicality of reaching the various destination. Students were exhausted by the end of the day after running to each new destination in order to complete the tasks.

“The field trip was really fun overall,” Takahashi said. “It's great that they had us take pictures because at the end of it all, I get to look back and remember everything. The entire day is perfectly preserved in the photos.”