Sound Cycle Continues

With a lack of vans here, and a re-tiling of the club there, through thick and thin we continued to have some great days of learnin' with the teens at Panther the last few weeks. I'll seperate this blog into two sections representing two different activities involved over the last few weeks. Here we go...

Section 1 - "Light Hunting"

Big Idea: Review with the teens the crickets and logoblocks software we'll be using to program thier sound sculptures, but make a game out of it.

Dates: Monday, January 23rd and Wednesday, January 25th

Groups Participating: Teens from Panther Boys and Grls club

Attendance: Myself, Gabe and 5 teens including Braela, Michael, Thomas, Jasmine, and Joshua

Software: Logoblocks

Hardware: laptops, crickets, transfer crickets, transfer wires, light sensors, motors, motor cables

Directions: I split the group into 3 grops of 2 and named them "team 120", "team 150" and "team 200" and wrote them on a notepad. The team names related to light specific values they were going to set on their crickets. The challenge was to program your cricket for the motor to run only when your light sensor read your team's sensor value, then find how many differant places in the club (outside the teen room) had that light reading, signified by the motor continually running.
Whoever could name the most spots in the club and could report them back to me won. I let them know that I would go with them and test thier claim occasionally, so it had to be accurate.
Just so you know, Thomas and Micheal of "team 120" won with places like, "behind the soda machine" and, my personal favorite, "inside my mouth".

Associated Concepts: Create a fun competition while learning how to program crickets.

Best Part: The race to find spots, and testing to see if they were right.

Worst Part: On Wednesday, I got everything prepared to get the teens to the museum, but there were only 3 teens at the club - not enough to make a run. So, I went out to the club and gave Eddie his T-shirt after his completion of 12 hours.

Improvements: Be sure to create a game out of it - it pumps them up.

Section 2 - Movie Making

Big Idea: We found out last minute that the club wanted DesignIT to submit another entry to the annual national short-film competition. Last year we worked on the film over a period of 2 weeks and ended up winning regionals and going onto the national rounds. This year we found out with 3 days. I give all the credit to Gabe on this one, since they did most of the shooting and editing when I couldn't be there. Overall, for the time we had, the movie "A Day Glimpse At Our Life At Our Club" was a success.

Dates: Monday, January 31st and Tuesday and Wednesday February 1st and 2nd

Groups Participating: Panther teens

Attendance: Gabe and mainly 4 teens - Braela, Micheal, Joshua and Thomas

Software: Movie Maker

Hardware: the clubs digital camera and our laptop.

Directions: On Monday I brainstormed with the group. The theme of this year's competition was "Life at the Boys and Girl's Club", so we sat down and listed all the things they like to do at the club. We then wrote them all down and decided what order they should go in. We then decided on a specific caste of actors, camera people, and directors. Overall, it worked out that everyone got to play the role in the film they wanted.

Associated Concepts: Filming, acting, directing a group, cooperation, editing, working under pressure.

Best Part: Seeing the final product and premiering it at the 2006 Second Annual Panther Film Festival (to be blogged about later).

Worst Part: Lack of time, but Gabe and the crew did a great job.

Improvements: Simply getting going earlier and tying it into a cycle plan.

I still have to blog about three fantastic events in the last few weeks, including a musician named Justin Pate visiting the club and showing what you can do with experimenting with sound and technology (got some great photos of the event taken by one of teens, Micheal, who has a very abstract style), our "Drill-Off", the Panther Film Festival, and also the ALA bluedots' public display of thier projects. Until then, u-n-i-t-y.

myles