think it. dream it. design it.: May 3

Lights and Cameras at Northside

I’m at the Northside club from 4:00 until 7:30 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each day when I show up, Santiago has already gotten out the laptops and the Intel play cameras and the teens are using them. We’ve planned a field trip to the Museum each Friday but this Friday, they didn’t have enough staff to send over a group. Thursday was the last day in the series this week where I introduced Crickets as a way to power Christmas lights and LEDs, helped the teens on their stop-motion and video projects, and built Magic Lanterns.

Tuesday. Introduced simple circuits and switches. Continued with their interest in stop-motion animation. The teens have been working with clay, Alien and Predator action figures, and other junk they’ve found around the club to make stop motion films using the Intel play cameras. Jesse and his friend have been steadily working on their skateboarding film. Earlier today I went to Best Buy and bought a USB Analog to Digital converter so they could transfer their VHS movies to the laptops. Their learning curve on the Windows Movie Maker software has been shallow. Their prior experience editing with the camera and a VCR transferred easily into the video editing project.

Wednesday. Crickets powering Christmas lights, and LED programming races. Some of the teens (Troy and Michael) continue working with simple circuits and switches. They’ve discovered simple motors in my bin and are hooking them into 9V battery circuits.

Thursday. The flow of my day was interrupted because they had two guest speakers come in and talk to the teens. One woman from TCC talked about options for college and a police officer shared information about careers in law enforcement. I introduced Myles’ light boxes finally but the teenagers were just not interested. I got a few of them to draw pictures of Cartman (from the SouthPark cartoon), low-rider bicycles and faces traced from a package. A few more made another stop-motion film. One older kid, a community service volunteer, got excited when I showed him how to build beats in Soundblaster. He raps and wants to produce his own music. He spent all of Thursday afternoon on my laptop, making beats and freestyling to them.