Thursday=Noisy Northside

On Thursday, I went out to the Club to round up my invested Tuesday kids who are likely to want to come to the Museum. This really is an important step now since Mary can't justify being short a staff point person while Mr. Joe drives the kids over if we have fewer than eight who are coming. I go out to the Club and lock eyes with the kids, reminding them that it's Thursday, that it's Museum day, and that they need to call their parents if they didn't know that they'd be out a little late.

We got to the Museum and headed upstairs to the studio. I let the kids have a few minutes in IAP before we began because I knew it was the first time a couple of them had come this semester. Salvador came into the studio immediately, ready to begin. A couple of other kids trickled in quickly, too, and began imagining and building structures for their chain reactions.

I had liked the feel of Tuesday at the Club enough that I tried to recreate it. I had the room set up with all of the different kinds of supplies that we'd been using out at Northside over the last several weeks. I had a table with simple switch materials and soldering irons. I brought out the large domino blocks and the marble run boards. I set up a table with laptops and crickets. The kids, too, had easy access to various power tools, craft supplies, and lumber.

It didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. I don't think I communicated my vision for chain reaction sculptures as well as I could have. Some of the kids, new this year, had not spent a great deal of time with crickets and, while very engaged in programming them, didn't see immediately how they could be used in their reactions.

Nick spent much of his time helping kids with power tools while I focused on the kids who were working with crickets. Perhaps it could have been more fluid.

Michael (not Garcia--short Michael), who always spends most of his Tuesday afternoons with us at the Club, came to the Museum for the first time. He was incredibly involved in making a marble run. We were working together, and he asked if we came to the Museum every Thursday night. I told him that, yes, we bring the DesignIT kids every Thursday, and he replied, "oh, good. I'm definitely coming from now on!"

Aaron (latino Aaron) really ran away with the cricket programming. He'd had some experiences with crickets that we'd taken out to the Club pre-programmed, but he'd never gotten behind the screen before and worked in Logoblocks. He was really interested in the hex displays. After much experimenting (he worked with the crickets for nearly two hours), he programmed the cricket so that when a domino fell on a light sensor, the hex display would run a countdown from 10 to 1 and then start a motor! How cool is that?

Josh was a bit disappointed in himself because he couldn't remember anything about programming. Except for the first night, which wasn't content-driven, he hadn't been out to the Museum since spring.

It was a good night, except for my leaving Lazaro at the Club! I'm positively sick with myself over it...