ALA Day 1 -- Myles

first day we had a blast. i felt very comfortable due when they walked in because we were very prepared. couple reasons for that... 1) saafir and jon rocked at getting eveything together, that being computer stations with activities from the summer at each station and obvious labels at each station with descriptions of what to do and look at 2) we had questions and instructions prepared for the gang to focus on before, during and after the activity (ie. be sure to talk to two people during the activity about things you enjoyed or had questions with) and 3) also enjoyed the follow up activity of naming reasons they came back to designIT.

about #3...i think its really really really important to take note of these reasons they came back. a few of them included...
-being in the newspaper
-building stuff from junk
-doesn't feel like work due to freedom of activities
-scholarships in future
-power tools!
-the cazy people that lead it
-future job opportunities/security
-high tech new activities
-field trips
-seeing the same people equals friendships

i believe these are very important to focus on and understand for the future of design it, so a quick excercise for you to do right now, go back and read that list again and brainstorm each as to how it can be continued, encouraged, and/or improved. and i like meghan and saafir's idea to next time ask "what do you think made other people not come back to design it, and how we can improve these things?"

as far as things that could have gone better, we had a few people not participate in the activity presented about talking to one another about the projects, which really isn't a big deal, but i did notice those who did the activity got alot out of the the stations. it also encouraged A) learning about possible future activities for the kids who weren't here this summer and B) boosted self confidence in kids who had done the projects. for next time, a simple solution to pushing kids to do the assigned activity would simply be to ask them at random how far they were on the task (ie "okay, who have you talked to so far and about what?")

one more thing i noticed was that the stop motion films were by far the most popular station. with that in mind it might be important to consider where to place that during the year in order for kids to keep interest. excited to read other blogs and get this party started.
ps.please know my grammer is not this bad i write this way to get my thoughts down fast before i forget em.
love myles