Lost and Found

Thursday you commit to your final project — on paper, to the facilitator. Three days. Today's job is small: know the menu.

1. Open the project menu. Read all twelve formats. Actually read them.
2. On MY COURSE (back cover), write TWO formats you could see yourself building.
3. Notice which ones need supplies. Thursday's form is how supplies get bought — no form, no supplies.

Tomorrow you narrow to one. Wednesday you lock. Thursday you claim it. Small steps, every day.

One sheet, folded like a book. Cover: your name, "Day 12," the date. Then:

36 squares. Every square has a name. Draw yours big enough to write one word inside a square. Your grid is your instrument today. Rig it right.

One mission fails. One mark on a map survives it. 267 years later, that mark finds a ship. Watch how.

Southack's mission was a failure. His mark was not. That is the whole lesson before you touch a grid: a location can outlive everything else about a story.

1. Find Southack's wreck note on the chart, near Wellfleet. He spelled the ship "Whido."
2. Find his note about the dead. The town buried 102 men from our ship.
3. Look at the shape of the Cape. He charted it from a small boat in rough weather. What would you double-check before trusting it?

The chart gets you close. Close is not found.

The wreck lies under sand off Marconi Beach, near 41.891 north, 69.957 west. Divers there do not wander around with shovels. They drop a grid on the seabed and give every square a name. Then they dig square by square.

Pretend your 6x6 grid is that patch of seabed. Time to bet.

1. Study the chart one last time. Then look at your 36 squares.
2. Pick the one square you would dig first. Gut call. Mark a small dot in it.
3. Under the grid, one line: why that square?
4. Crew huddle: compare dots. Agree on your crew's opening call for the game.

Your teacher holds the seabed: a fixed map of the 36 squares, kept on their own screen, nothing printed, nothing handed out. Eight squares hold something. The rest are sand. The squares don't move once the game starts, so a smart guess is a real bet, not a coin flip.

Down there somewhere: coins. A bell. A shoe. Concretions. A concretion is sand and rusted iron fused into one rock. Surprises hide inside.

1. Crews call in turns. One square per turn. Letter first, like a sailor: "B4."
2. Your teacher calls back what is there. Every crew marks every call on their own grid. X for sand. A word for a find.
3. A dug square stays dug. Call it again and your turn is gone. The grid remembers. So should you.
4. A find counts only when it is in your FINDS LOG: square, find, one line on what it might tell us. No square, no find.
5. Watch where the hits land. Wrecks leave patterns. Crews that read the pattern win.

Teacher note: nothing to print. The answer grid lives in runsheets.html (d12) on your own device — same drive, no handout, never shown to the room.

When the seabed empties, your teacher reveals the answer grid. Look at the shape the finds make. Wrecks do not scatter randomly. Crew done logging while others dig? Sharpen your tell-us lines. Best one in the room wins points. Then Whydah’s Voyage awaits.

Divers proved a whole ship with objects. Now you. The talking piece goes around: name one object that would prove YOUR life to a digger in 300 years. One object. Explain only if you want to. Pass counts.

Why does evidence matter for the story you tell?

A shoe in a glass case is just sad. A shoe logged at one square of one wreck became a real boy named John King. Location turned a thing into a story.

Three hundred years from now, divers drop a grid on YOUR ship's wreck site. They raise one object.

Pitch is Thursday. Your person is locked. Today you pick the HOW.

1. Write your person's name at the top of MY COURSE. Ink it. Locked.
2. Look at your two formats. Which one shows your person's evidence best? Circle one.
3. One line: why that format fits that person.

Thursday you stand up and say it in under a minute: one person, one format, one reason. That is the whole pitch. You are closer than you think.