Northside Weekly Plan

The Students
7th through 11th grade kids at the Northside Boys & Girls Club.

Learning Objectives
Get a group of teenagers who have only passing familiarity with Crickets to become engaged in programming with Logoblocks. I want them to understand the basics of how Crickets operate and be able to set-up a lap-top with a transfer Cricket, a Cricket, a motor, and a sensor plugged into the proper ports. They should be able to turn the Cricket on and off and create a simple program that includes an "IF-Then" block, a math operator, and a "Loop" block. The goal is to get them familiar enough so they can make independent progress on building thier musical projects. My other objective this week is to get the teens accustomed to regular activity in the new DesignIT Studio at Northside.

Saturday
12:00pm – 4:00pm Make sure the internet works at Northside. Give the teens the schedule for the week. Gather and organize materials for the entire week. Take whatever we can spare to the club and go shopping for the rest.

Monday
Saafir and Rockey are at school Get Santiago to set up the laptops? Set some programming and internet challenges for the teens. Get eight of the teens to clean the front half of the room. Five wireless internet adaptors. Five serial-USB adaptors. Ten laptops.

Tuesday
2:30pm – 630pm Arrive at the club at 3:15 and set-up laptop/Cricket/alligator clip/motor sensor setups. Bring notebooks for a journaling exercise. Bring fruit and a nice snack (microwaved popcorn?). Setup a projector and do a Cricket tutorial. Five wireless internet adaptors.Five serial-USB adaptors. Ten laptops.Fifteen Cricket set-ups with extra batteries.Microwave popcorn and microwaveTen journals with pencils and markers

Wednesday
4:00pm - 6:00pm Have Santiago setup the laptops and have Cricket sets available for checkout.

Thursday
3:00pm - 7:00pm The teens will come to the Museum from the site. As soon as they get here we'll do some fun get-to-know-you games. ???Then we'll do a tour of some of the cool areas of the Museum??? We'll then spend an hour exploring mechanical contraptions (that will happen to be run by Crickets) The students will get to try their hand at programming the contraptions to run with Logoblocks programs. A writing exercise will close out the evening. (Rockey -- please help me refine this)
Five wireless internet adaptors.Five serial-USB adaptors. Ten laptops.Fifteen Cricket set-ups with extra batteries.Snacks. Ten or fifteen motion modules

Friday
5:00pm - 7:00pm More open Studio time. This time we'll have the PieIDEAS web site up with some good LEGO kits and art materials to spark some exploration. We'll see how many kids just surf the net.