Bomb Shelter Application Paper

Application Paper: Bomb Shelter

Concrete Experience:

During the “Bomb Shelter” exercise, the students in class were separated into groups of approximately 6 to 8 students per group. Our group (group 8) sat in a circle around each other so we could achieve effective personal communication. After a few minutes of silence everyone read the exercise sheet that was passed out. Next, our group began to discuss what basis we were going to use to rate the 12 people that were candidates for the bomb shelter. The first person to start the discussion sat across from me and said that we should vote based on the candidates substance or what the person brought to the table. Some other members in my group brought up the possibility of focusing on procreation. They said this would be appropriate if we had to repopulate after the 6-month period. I then said that the instructions did not make it clear that they would have to repopulate, so we then focused on the substance approach. We ran down the list and the little facts about the people that came with it. After discussion was open for a while we chose to follow our substance based approach. The only exception where we did not follow this approach was for the kid where we took a moral approach to choosing him. I have noticed in past exercises as well as this one my group has had a very strong moral and ethical approach to decision making. In our group while voting for who should be rated at what position there was usually someone who disagreed, but the majority of the group would shoot down their arguments and they would surrender to the majority. I also noticed in this exercise there was one person who did not participate that much or at all. I tried to bring up the pros and cons that I thought about each ranking even if it was against the rest of the majority. I feel like this helped the group to not be one sided and it helped to start more conversation about the rankings. We decided on the final rankings in...