Animation Station Celebration!

Debriefing after a great afternoon on the floor

Today, ALA students were challenged to set up three animation stations in LSD on the floor as a trial run for Mindfest. Three tables were placed in the LSD "nook" behind the air scribes for Thaumatropes, Flipbooks, and Stop Motion Animation.

Mindfest Cycle: Animation Station

dates: Thursday Sept 29th - wednesday, October 5th

big idea: help the teens learn about working with visitors and planning activities through animation activities on the museum floor

attendance: 9 on Wednesday (Crystal, Sammie, Gabe, and Saafir all worked with ALA this week)

supplies: laptops, play dough, Intel Play cameras and thier software, extension cords, markers, scotch tape, 4 x 6 white index cards, drinking straws, 2 inch wide strips of 8 1/2 x 11 white copy paper, pencils.

skills: constructing thaumatropes, flips books, and playdough characters. gathering materials to use on the museum floor, planning short intel play scenes, creating signs for the Museum floor, talking to visitors about DesignIT, helping visitors create animation projects using our three different media

best part: working with kids of all ages. We had the chance to interact with kids from the Internation academy, and some second grade students. To begin, we randomly assigned our kids to a station. Our kids worked at either the intel play station first, or at the flip book and thaumatrope station. after a 40 minutes period, we switched them around to work at a new station.

hardest part: the kids had a hard time working with some of the kids that were their age. I think the boys got a little intimidated by the more outgoing girls! :) The space we had to work with in LSD was a little cramped. We decided to space the table out more when we run the stations at Mindfest. Small kids had a hard time grasping how to construct a thaumatrope. Cody suggested that we have a sign/diagram on how to construct a thaumatrope so that all of our workers won't be so scatter brained and have to re teach the concept every 5 seconds when a new little kids walks up to the table.