Panther Day 1 - September 16

Today we went to the Panther Boys and Girls Club to introduce the new year of Design it Studio. We had about 10 kids from last year's program that came for the session. We talked about the summer briefly, and Megan did a wonderful job of working with the group in an activity to help us all get acquainted again. The kids were defintiely interested in finding the projects that they had worked on as well as seeing themselves in pictures. Dominic was interested in doing some animation movies as well as taking apart a car, but he won't be able to join us much at all because of football. Taylor expressed interest in working on more Microworlds games. Juan was also incredibly interested in working in Microworlds and finishing his already started project from the summer - Gabe sat down with him and they worked on his project for about 45 minutes. The kids seemed to like the scratch animation and the instruments. These were the positives on the day.
A few things that need to be considered - the kids today were terribly distracted. THis isn't our normal day, so maybe it will be a little better on Monday. A couple of the kids seemed liek they didn't want to be involved in any work, just playing at the musem. There were many times where discussion was interrupted by people leaving and coming back in, friends from the club coming into the space to talk to studio members about any number of things during our discussion time. THis was very distracting. There were many moments where i felt like Megan and i were having a conversation with each other and Gabe, and all the kids were just interested in other things other than studio. We did have some people come in and want to know what we were doing, so we got to share a little with other students about Design it. The club sites are going to be pretty good for open time, but for work time, or workshop time, we need to do that at the museum. The club is just not going to lend itself to a concerted focused atmosphere for project work.
Jonathon