Saturday with Panther

Students: Dominic, Jasmine, Taylor, Jonathon, Vittoria, Andrea, and Kiah
Staff: Saafir and Nick

The goal of the day was to build a dominoe run contraption that would be triggered by a falling dominoe and would, in turn, cause another dominoe to fall. I was trying to set up a session that would result in wooden contraptions like the examples that Nick and I built from cannabalized sound automata from the summer. Mine was a simple spool mechanism that pulled a block off of a stool and swung down to knock over the next block. Nick used the boot that Karen built during the summer to push a block down an incline

Many of the teens never got a good picture of the goal of "building a contraption". I had a clear picture in my head but I hadn't communicated it well to them. I think I had too many dominoes available at the beginning. I wanted to constrain their exploration to "finding ways to get a domino to fall over when a cricket is triggered by a another falling dominoe." Instead many of the groups spent a lot of their time setting up domino runs. Also, their attention was really on the social experience and much of their energy was taken up by poking fun at their friends, telling stories about school, and arguing about what music to play on the computer.

Here are some other things I will do differently next time...

I will...

• set the day up from the begining with a tighter structure;
• tell the group about the days plan, hour by hour;
• spend some time working torward solutions to the design problem before we touch materials or tools. For example, I will tell them to "take ten minutes and explore the designs that Nick created for the examples, then at 12:15, I will hand out butcher paper and markers and we will sketch some other possibilities for making a dominoe fall."
• after that, I will give each team exactly what they need to start on their project -- a cricket, alligator clips, motor, scrap wood, and aluminum foil; this will narrow the available design solutions to a manageable level
  
• mark out clear working areas for the teams
• announce the teammates at the beginning, without making obvious how I picked them out
  
• do a progress check at the halfway point of the day