5.1.2 Orienteering task While Senthil and Yojit (on the first afternoon) needed only eighteen minutes to find their way beyond the immediate vicinity of the starting point, Alex (the next day) took more than an hour. Alex’s messages to his team-mates Bing Qiang and Kwok Yaw included five examples of ‘clarifications’ compared to Senthil and Yojit’s one, and this is consistent with the results of the discriminant analysis described in Table 7. Bing Qiang and Kwok Yaw, like their counterparts Maureen and Kai Wen the preceding day, kept their cool and used predominantly ‘task frames’ and ‘interactional scaffolds’, and used several allocentric Frames of Reference.
Ultimately, however, the two of them failed to successfully communicate the prescribed route to Alex, who in turn could not deduce it from the exchange of messages. After 92 minutes had elapsed, the exercise was called off. In total, Bing Qiang and Kwok Yaw had sent a text-message every 3.7 minutes and a picture-message every 15.4 minutes (that is, they sent some sort of message to Alex every 3.0 minutes, which is the same frequency acheived by Maureen and Kai Wen the preceding day), and Alex sent a text-message every 4.4 minutes and a picture-message every 11.5 minutes (that is, a message of some sort was sent by Alex every 3.2 minutes). It is worth noting that despite Alex sending messages more frequently than Yojit and Senthil had done the preceding day, he still could not successfully deduce the prescribed route.
What might possibly account for such contrasting outcomes within the same neighbourhood, for the same prescribed route? To what extent, if any, might the respective spatial intelligences of the team-members play a role in determining a positive outcome in the orienteering task?
Like all the other participants in the study, their fieldtrips were bookended by the pre- and post-tests, which were administered on an individual basis. Maureen – the only female student in the team – took 34 out of a maximum of 300 seconds to attempt the first part of the pre-tests, which required her to match pairs of three-dimensionally rendered objects (described in more detail in Chapter Three). She scored the maximum score of five in this test. Of her three team-mates for the orienteering task, Kai Wen took 38 seconds and scored three correct pairs, Yojit took 169 seconds and Senthil 179 seconds. Both Yojit and Senthil scored four correct pairs.
For the second part of the pre-test, which required participants to deduce both the axis and angle of rotation of a QuickTime VR panorama, Senthil was the only one of the four to complete the test without error, and he took 270 out of a maximum of 300 seconds to do so. Maureen needed 169 seconds, and although she correctly deduced the angle of rotation, the axis of rotation was off by 400 metres. Kai Wen needed the same duration as Senthil, but his angular deviation was 145 degrees and the distance deviation was 425 metres. Finally, Yojit needed 280 seconds, and his angular deviation was 75 degrees and the distance deviation was 225 metres.
It is worth noting that in the pre-tests, both Bing Qiang and Kwok Yaw obtained the maximum score for both parts of the test, with Bing Qiang taking 215 seconds for the first part and 300 seconds for the second, and Kwok Yaw needing only 43 seconds and 162 seconds respectively. Alex’s score for the first part of the pre-test was four correct pairs in 79 seconds, and for the second part he took 54 seconds, but had a 25 degree angular deviation and a 175 metre distance deviation.
Studying the messaging exchange between Bing Qiang and Kwok Yaw on the one hand, and Alex on the other, more closely, it would appear that the breakdown in communication might have occurred as early as the fifteenth minute (time index 1451), when Alex betrays a lack of understanding as to precisely what kind of track his team-mates were referring to. His query “what track?” is answered in the next minute with a detailed elaboration “red brick track in front of block”, but three minutes later Alex introduces what can only be called an unsubstantiated guess when he asks “go to the mrt?” (referring to the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station nearby). In the transcript, at no earlier point had the leading pair used the word ‘mrt’, so the fact that Alex guessed that the MRT station was along the prescribed route is significant in that it is an example of the emphasis placed on the public transport infrastructure by many adolescents in Singapore – in fact he did not wait for an answer to his question, and within the same minute he sent the message “I’m at the mrt now..” (this unwarranted mention of the public transport system, particularly the Mass Rapid Transit system, was by no means an isolated case – the public transport system features large in the photographic evidence used by participants during the perspectives task, often regardless of its relevance to the given topic). Indeed, even several minutes later in the orienteering task, when Alex had returned to the starting point to try again and was given the instruction “Saw e bending road liaoz?”, he acknowledges that he has found the road, and refers to it once again in the context of the MRT station – “I see the road already. It is goes of the mrt station.”
<- 5.1.1 Introduction -> 5.1.3 Cognitive maps | 
