Marble Mazes!

Hey gang. The summer thus far has been a blast. Kieth from IBM was a superstar during the ALA"Day in the Park" summer institute. I was not present as much during that week, so I'm going to leave that blogging to Saafir and Jonathon. The second ALA institute went very well, with moments we couldn't have planned better. Here's a sum up...

Activity 1: ALA Marble Maze Summer Institute

Big Idea: Combine tool skills, circut building skills, cricket programming skills, and creativity to build a challenging, hand-held marble maze involving cricket-controlled obstacles or decorations of some kind.

Dates: Monday, June 20th to Friday June 24th

Attendance: Saafir, Jonathon, Myself and 12 ALA students

Materials:
Software: Laptops, crickets, transfer crickets, transfer cables, varied sensors, motors, motor cables, led's, bus cables, sound recorders
Hardware: At least 12'' by 12'' solid cardboard pieces, small, long pieces of easily cut wood, hot glue, hot glue sticks, various crafty materials

Directions: On the cardboard sections build wood/cardboard hand-held marble mazes involving cricket interaction somewhere in the game (ie. laughing from sound recorder when light is blocked, closing doors when circut is completed ect.)

Skills: Constructing skills, cricket programming skills.

Best Part: Having the kids walk in in the morning and get started on continuing work on thier projects without us asking, and on the last day cruisin around the museum showing off the kid's finished projects and watching the visitors give them a shot.

Worst Part: Getting some focused on cricket/sensor interaction

Improvements: Making sure each kid goes in depth with cricket programming and involving the crickets in thier projects. We could possible fix this by physically giving each kid/gruop a cricket that needs to be involved (they get to choose how with the variety of sensors at thier disposal)