Panther -- Day 2

Today I talked to counselors at the Cassada School and the FWISD Accelerated Academy. Tomorrow I will talk to Virginia Dean, the principal of J.P. Elder middle school. They have 1200 students there!

Bill was a hit today at Panther when he showed up with the Trans-Pecos rat snakes and the tarantula. All the kids in the club were excited, many of them running toward (or away from) Bill, Jonathon, and Myles as they carried around the animals. The kids felt at home in the teen room if their language and attitude were any indication. After the excitement from the animals had subsided, we ended up with all of the teens in the club in the room, sitting on the couches and talking about their summer. Earlier when I had tried to gather them all in the teen room, I didn’t have much luck. When we had them all together we talked briefly about Design IT and did the straw-hacking experiment. I quickly demonstrated four or five unusual ways for using a soda straw and invited the teens to try a few or come up with their own. Using a drinking straws I made a kazoo with a pitch slider, levitated a ping-pong ball, animated a scrunched straw wrapper, created a spray gun, and launched a straw rocket.