Melon Harp Fun

Marcus preparing a young visitor to make music on his own!




Ever Make Music With A Watermelon???

The Melon Harp Setup

Design IT at Radio Shack Store One - August 20

Family Fun day at Radio Shack's STORE ONE took place on August 20th, and they called us to be a part of this special event. The function of the day was to attract kids and their families to come and get a Child ID kit - Radio Disney was there along with other community partners. The museum was able to take the new mascot, DYNAMO, to take pictures with the kids and promote the museum's new exhibits, including Lone Star Dinosaurs (which actually features some of our DesignIT students.)

DesignIT Studios had the kitchen area inside the STORE ONE set up with the Melon Harp activity. Jonathon was present, as well as Saafir, and from the ALA Chelsea Hinojosa and Marcus Kindles. Chelsea and Marcus did an amazing job working with the crickets, the computers, the sensors, and the fruit to entice kids and families to come over and make music. The theme of the store is technology everywhere, and our setup with the computers and crickets fit in nicely. Everyone who came seemed to thoroughly enjoy the event, and Tim Eaton from Radio Shack took some great video footage that we hope to get soon. There are pictures of the event below.

Chelsea, Marcus, Saafir, and Jonathon were able to talk about the program with many different families, some of which were familiar with the Boys and Girls Clubs. Marcus and Chelsea described how the crickets worked, how they were programmed, and how the students are able to learn to make sensors and machines like the kinetic sculptures already on display for Store ONE. DesignIT Studios also has a chance to put together more sculptures for display there.

This gave the program a great lead in for the new year. We all look forward to seeing how the new year will shape up - Mindfest is right around the corner!!!

Jonathon

Force Kids, Help them Find their Own Goals, or Let Them Flounder?

"Quite a bit of evidence shows that whereas people feel best when what they do is voluntary, they do not feel worst when what they do is obligatory. Psychic entropy is highest instead when persons feel that what they do is motivated by not having anything else to do. Thus both intrinsic motivation (wanting to do it) and extrinsic motivation (having to do it) are preferable to the state where one acts by default, without having any kind of goal to focus attention. The large part of life many people experience as being unmotivated leaves a great deal of room for improvement."

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1997. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. 23

4 Wacky Ideas

Wacky Idea 1:
Teach the teens to communicate using drawings. Have them design the instructions for putting together a cool IKEA product as an exercise in visual communication. We'll take them up to the store afterwards to talk with their designers and check out the software tools they use. They can present their version of the instructions to each other and discuss pros and cons. Next the students can design a new Studio project or take an old one, and write instructions for building it. We could swap instruction sets with teens from MyBEST and try to build each other's projects long distance. We could find teens the same age in Mexico or Singapore who put together furniture in factories and start a pen-pal program.


Wacky Idea 2:

Use an iPod or some other cool tech thing as an incentive in DesignIT. We'll have Radioshack donate 5 or 10 of them. The students who create the coolest projects and work through the most badges in DesignIT wins an iPod. I'll E-mail Blaine and ask him if it's possible. If Radioshack won't do it, I'll go to Apple.








Wacky Idea 3:
A DesignIT Studio t-shirt. A long list in a light color....

glue IT. code IT. build IT.
draw IT. map IT. think IT.
dream IT. design IT. test IT.
paint IT. saw IT. make IT.
invent IT. smash IT. hack IT.



Wacky Idea 4:
Another badge (if we do badges) ...a book literacy badge. If a student brings me receipts from three months worth of library receipts and/or a reading log and a number of the books and magazines are about art, science, or technology, they can earn a literacy badge.

Audioblogging is Phenomenal!

"Ohmigod this is so cool! Blogging over the phone. I've left myself so many voicemail messages that I need to blog later, now I can post them directly to the DesignIT Studio blog. I won't bore you anymore, but this is amazing! I'm going to forward this idea to everybody I know."

Position Open!

DesignIT Studio Coach

Join an innovative teen program at the nationally recognized Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. Design IT Studio cultivates information technology skills in teens by giving them experiences as designers. You will mentor groups of teens as they create projects using information technology and art. Hours are mostly before school, after school, and on the weekends.

Responsibilities:

• mentoring teens as they develop art and technology projects
• planning weekly workshop activities
• planning field trips and outings, and
• working with a team of wacky people who are passionate about helping young people learn.

Assets:

• Ability to think on your feet and follow students interests
• Experience in education and/or informal science
• Talent at creating student-centered learning environments
• Involvement in personal projects – artistic, community, or curiosity driven
• A background in any of the following: visual art, IT, performing art, engineering, or science

Hours: 10 - 20 per week, before school, after school, and on the weekends

Application Deadline: October 22, 2006

Late night at IKEA: Journal Entry

The longest day I've had in a while. I started at 5:00am typing an e-mail to Joyce describing my uniform policy. I also sent some other e-mails out. Tonight I'm going to the IKEA in Carrolton to pick up a desk for Chip. I want to suprise him when he gets back from San Fransisco.

I hired Sammie to be the DesignIT Studio clerk. I hired Santiago and Felipe to work as DesignIT Studio staff at the Northside Boys & Girls club. Jonathon and I put together materials to do an event at Radioshack. I want to get Vishal to take professional photographs of the event.

_____________________________

Now it's 12:00am and I'm at home about to go to bed. I need to get up first thing tomorrow to do the Radioshack event. I didn't have any success rounding up any of the Northside kids.

I drove the van to IKEA in Carroltonwith Kim and my mom to buy Chip's desk. We were there until 10:30 at night. The store is as cool as the one in Houston. I even bought a six foot tropical tree for the office for $35.00.

An awesome day though.

DesignIT Studios Displays Student Projects at Radioshack Flagship Store

DesignIT Studios is an outside of school program run by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. It immerses teens from two Boys & Girls Clubs and a middle school in two years of creative design with information technology. So far, we have introduced more than one-hundred teens to technology as a tool of invention rather than as a product to consume. The teens create artistic IT projects using laptops, digital cameras, craft materials, microcontrollers, and power tools. The projects that the DesignIT teens produce are compelling. Radioshack liked them enough to display them during the ribbon-cutting ceremony of its flagship store. Seven kinetic sculptures decorate the rotunda of the new store, responding to changing light and the movement of visitors.

EHR/ESI 2005 Program Officer: Michael R. Haney NSF Award Numbers: 0322665 Award Title: DesignIT Studios PI Name: Chip Lindsey; Co PI: Kit Goolsby, Joyce Baker, Kevin Foster Institution Name: Fort Worth Museum of Science & History

Robin Reardon, the designer of StoreOne, had worked with the president of our Museum back in her Imagineering days with Disney. She was looking for an appealing way to use the front display area of the store and called Van Romans for ideas. Van suggested the kinetic sculptures. They turned out to be a good fit since they are full of RadioShack connectors and parts. Van had first seen the sculptures at the end of a summer workshop with guest presenters from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The original sculptures were built to provide a light-sensitive soundtrack to a scratch animation film. More were built throughout the year as the idea evolved. Thirty of the sculptures wound up as centerpieces in the Museum’s fund raising gala, “The Mad Scientist’s Ball.” When the Radioshack request came, a group of DesignIT teens designed new kinetic sculptures and built them over the course of a spring break. The new sculptures were installed in time for the grand opening of the flagship store downtown Fort Worth. They remained on display throughout the summer of 2005.

ALA Year 3 Kickoff Meeting

ALA Year 3 Kickoff Meeting
August 16, 2005
Joyce Baker, Jonathon Mills, Randall Scott (new principal at ALA), and Abdur-Raheem Saafir

Teacher Pay $22.00/hr (Saafir: I will arrange it so that we pay the teachers involved once monthly. We would like to talk to art, science, and language arts teachers about helping with the project.)

ScheduleMornings four days per week. 8:00-9:20, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday (Saafir: This looks like a viable plan. I have found one of our part-time staff already. Jonathon: We could require the returning teens to come on Thu-Fri and the new teens on Mon-Tue. They could also come on any other days if they choose.)

Some Tentative Dates September 7 Start Running bus September 12 First Monday morning for returning group October 21 Mindfest Film Festival October 22 Mindfest October 24 First morning for new group

Parent Nights Open House Nights Parent Orientation Day(s) at the Museum Family Science Nights (Saafir: I asked Monta about them and she supported the idea. I’m will ask Colleen when I figure out the details. It looks good.)

Some of Randall’s questions How does DesignIT Studios’ model for learning fit with ALA’s? (Saafir: I will send over a copies of two books that shine light on how we think about learning in the Studios)The ALA approach and DesignIT are great ideas. How can we spread them through the district? Books written by teachers, etc.

Documentation New requirement. All students must document two applied learning projects. Student journals. Student Blogs