ALA Mindfest Cycle: Chain Reactions Week

I'm writing this entry three days later so I'll probably miss some details. I was excited to start the year back with the ALA crew. The focus of our work this week is chain reactions on the museum floor.

activity/cycle title: Mindfest Cycle: Chain Reactions
dates: monday, september 12th - wednesday, september 16
big idea: help the teens learn about working with visitors and planning activities through chain reactions on the museum floor
attendance:8 on Monday, 9 on Tuesday, 9 on Wednesday (Crystal, Sammie, Gabe, and Saafir all worked with ALA this week)
hardware: laptops, crickets, alligator clips, simple switches built from cardboard, aluminum tape, and foil
software: logoblocks
other materials: wooden blocks, masking tape for marking work areas on the carpet
associated skills: programming crickets to run a motor when a switch is closed, and gathering materials to use on the museum floor, planning, building simple switches, soldering, creating signs for the Museum floor, talking to visitors about DesignIT, helping visitors build chain reactions
associated concepts: simple circuits with switches, building a reliable switch,
best part: the relaxed feel of the morning sessions. An hour is a short chunk of time and the students seem to enjoy working during that time. It's nice to be finished working with the students early in the day. It was great to clean the studio thoroughly and Crystal, Sammie, and I all wore black on Wednesday.
hardest part: the Wednesday didn't work the way I planned. We never made it to the floor becasue the preparation took so much time. Next time, I will have to budget our time better and plan to spend most of the Wednesday out in the galleries.
culminating event: we will do several trail runs with visitors, and the final run of the activity during Mindfest.
some notes: I have two more days in the week so I can regain some lost ground. While Monday and Tuesday went really well, Wednesday was a minor disaster. We started out the day talking about the Mindfest cycle schedule. Then we brainstormed a list of materials and approaches to use on the floor with chain reactions. Finally, we divided the nine students into teams of three and assigned them to collect the stuff they would need to work on the floor. By the time we had collected materials and programmed Crickets to run the automata components, we had run clean out of time. A couple of the teens were restless and onery that day and I wasn't in a great mood myself. Oh well :-(

I'll blog more of this in an audioblog entry.