What is it?
The sorting hat from Harry Potter evaluates a young student’s traits and sorts them into one of four tribes. We wanted to replicate this iconic item but repurpose it to a wider usage. Instead of determining which “house” a student will live in for the next seven years the hat of sorting allows a student to think reflexively about who they are and who they want to be. We did this through questions based on psychology that would appeal to a broad audience. While at the end of the quiz you are sorted into one of four houses, we hoped that this experience will enable participants to think of the mutability of determined traits and their own agency in choosing who they want to be.
BECAUSE WE ARE MORE THAN JUST A HOUSE; WE ARE PEOPLE.
What it does
It takes you through a series of questions, and determines with its grand wizarding knowledge what house is most befitting of you. The house you have been chosen for is then announced, and lights on the hat flash in celebration.
How we built it
We broke the four houses down into different psychological profiles and then looked at interesting ways of determining personality traits, such as color tones and myers-briggs categories. Then we added a bit of Harry Potter magic, since the sorting hat is known to take into consideration the student's aspirations, and created a short quiz that would assess which of the four profiles the test taker fell into most heavily. We implemented the quiz in Java, adding sound files and images to make the experience more immersive, interactive and accessible.
That hat itself was constructed out of primarily found or re-homed objects such as items recycled from HampHack’s food service. We wanted to focus on sustainable fabrication and innovative methods so the hat’s structure is composed of cardboard, paper plates, paper, and a Hamp Hack t-shirt all held together by thread. We used found objects to perform the measurements, such as lengths of thread as individual measurements or paper as a straight-edge.
Challenges I ran into
We had several challenges in constructing the hat with the limited materials, such as what to use for the structure and how to hold it together. Another challenge was language knowledge in the team not overlapping, so one of our team members had to learn Java on the fly.
Accomplishments that we are proud of:
Learning fabrication Learning Java Realizing the intersection of math, shapes, and thread / Euclidian Geometry
What I learned
Java Fabrication and how to make the best use of limited resources How to use Arduino
What's next for The Hat of Sorting
Collecting dust on a shelf until the next batch of students rolls through to be sorted.
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