anticipation

Lionel Academy pt. 1

Out on the Outer Hebrides. Two groups... only an hour and a half for each, believe it or not. Much less than ideal, but the students did well, all things considered. I'm especially impressed with the bunny being chased, by the car crash, and by the giraffe eating a tree. More discussion on this to come in the following post.

Group !
(bird flapping)

Group @
(pink panther dancing)

Group #
(bunny chased by poacher)

Group $
(dancers... failed)

Group %
(dog wagging its tail)

Group ^'s plan
Group ^
(giraffe eating)

Group &
(man drinking tea)

Group *
(man hit on head with boxing glove)

nairn part 1

I have the documentation of this workshop (2.5 hours) mostly on the school video camera... so I'm waiting on the footage from them. Since there was only one of me, it was hard to get photos as well as try to video the kids explaining their ideas. So for now, I'll just put up what I have and try to explain until I can get stills from the videos (as well as the videos themselves).

Group *
Group *'s finished product
This group was a group of three mixed boy/girl... two boys, one girl. Twelve years old. Their idea was an ice skating penguin. They really had trouble trying to get it to stand upright, and in the end, it just collapsed. When asked what they would do differently next time they replied "focus more on getting it to work and then work on getting it to look nice." They worked well together as a group, trying to split up tasks between them. Penguin was attached to the motor, and the motor was on top of this plastic cup with a hole in it. In the end, it was just too much weight for the strength of the plastic cup.

Group &
Group & (pt 2)
This was a group of four mixed boy/girl... two and two. Again, age twelve. I don't have a proper photo of this finished as of yet. But it's a cow leaping over a moon with a shooting star chasing it. There's the star and the cow there. They were quite clever in how to get this to stand up ... kind of like a tri-fold poster presentation thing. they attached the moon directly to the motor to make it spin. Complete with stars and a background. They finished right on time, but I feel they didn't really push themselves as far as the mecahnism went. But they came up with good structural solutions for the shooting star (they had problems with it spinning around the wrong way) as well as the motor mount.


Group ^
This was a group of four boys who made a hero/villain fighting while flying over Hollywood. That's a palm tree there. Again, this group attached the people directly to the motor. Instead of mechanism problems (i.e. not using a mechanism other than the motor spinning), they had really hard structural problems. As in, they had trouble figuring out how to hold things in place. So, although maybe not as mechanically sophisticated as one might've hoped, they figured out a bit of structures. And they came up with a particularly quick/clever solution (thought not a good long-term one) of holding the motor in place with a rubber band.

Group %
This was a group of four girls who made a boat with a baby and a shark swimming around the boat with a person who had fallen in the water. Quite a complex story, there. Shark directly attached to motor. They had trouble with the stand for the boat (that you see there), but after asking them a few questions, they came up with the idea to give it some supports coming down from the top to the corners (making triangles to help keep it upright). This group worked exceptionally well as a team, dividing up tasks so that everyone was working all the time and it all came together at the end.

And then there's one more team that I don't have any photo of. Nor do I really remember right off hand what they worked on (this is what I get for waiting a few days to write this up... but I haven't had any spare time to do so and now I'm just staying up way too late to get this done before I forget). But this team of four boys had so much trouble. They wanted to do everything! And in the end, they really didn't have anything that worked. They were the only team, though, that tried to make a mechanism, of sorts. But they got distracted by the super hero/villain team. And they got discouraged by not knowing the answers right off hand, though I did my best to encourage them and talk them through questions.

plockton part 1

Wednesday the 31st, I ran my first workshop of the year in Plockton High School. Jamie Kean is the head teacher of technology/technological studies there, and it was his classroom and his space that I used for the workshop. I met Jamie when he came to MIT last September with one of the winning teams from the ICT Youth Challenge. I only had two hours to run the workshop, much like the workshops back in May, and this wasn't quite enough time for the kids to finish. But there were some good ideas and some good thoughts that went into things. I guess I'll go into more detail now.

Group !
This was a group of four girls age 12. As they didn't think they were really good at drawing, they ended up just writing a few words down and then starting to build. This group wanted to make a bird whose wings flapped to begin with, but after they tried to make a bird out of wire, they decided that the bird looked more like bumble bees. As a result, they changed their original idea, and went with multiple bees. They thought that if they put the bees on a spiral, then the bees would look like they were constantly flying up.


Group @'s preliminary design
Group @
This was a group of three boyx age 12. One of them played the guitar. They tossed around a few ideas at first, but because they were working in a group, they decided that a band would best work. They wanted the drummer's head to bob up and down (the motor was hooked up to the head via a wire/straw that you can see here. In the end, it sort of worked, but things weren't all held down in their places.

Group #'s preliminary design
Group #
This was a group of three girls age 12. They wanted to make a ladybug that flapped its wings. They thought of this because they liked ladybugs. While I was asking them how they thought they could get the wings to flap, and asking them if they'd seen anything like it around, one of them said that they had a wooden duck whose wings flapped at home (similar to the butterfly I made in Costa Rica, actually). So they went about trying to make it. They made a stand for the motor out of straws and wire and plastic strips and were going to put the ladybug on top. The cotton balls were to make the ladybug's body... they were going to wrap yarn around the balls to make the right shape.

Group $'s preliminary design
Group $
This was a group of three girls age 12. As you can see in their preliminary brainstorm, they went through several ideas before settling on this one: a man who has a hoop in his hand to blow bubbles. They managed to get his arm moving, but didn't have time to attach everything to the base.

Group %'s preliminary design
Group %
This was a group of three boys age 12. They wanted to make a football player kicking a football (i.e. soccer, for us Americans). They got the leg moving, but didn't manage to make the thing stable enough to stand.

Ok. Now for some more in-depth thinking on my part after just getting past what it was that the kids did. Coming soon (i.e. after dinner... maybe in two hours or three)...

from Nairn today