Cycle Two Activities
The second year of DesignIT Studio was divided up into four to six week long cycles. Each cycle had a theme around which the curriculum and activities were centered. The second year DesignIT students participated in the Art of Storytelling. First year DesignIT students and the Boys and Girls Club teens built Chain Reaction Sculptures.
Reflection Day: The students discussed their thoughts about the past cycle, and their ideas for activities for next year. The students were also able to sing up for cycle sessions for the rest of the school year, allowing students to choose to learn about what interests them.
Introduction to Storytelling: Students reviewed how to operate the cameras and the video-editing software. The staff discussed with them the process of story boarding and students wrote a story on the story boards that included a sombrero, a plastic spider, laboratory goggles, and a helium balloon.
Elements of Stories: The teens played the Egg Timer game (one student starts the story and the rest build off the story) as an approach to thinking about the elements that good stories contain. The storytelling was filmed and the group discussed plot, characters, theme, setting, point of view, style and tone.
Critique: The students critiqued the story that was filmed previously based on the elements of good stories that was discussed earlier.
Silent Skits: As a way to focus on the process of telling a story, the teens created skits in which there were no words and sounds. The other teens tried to guess the story from just the actions of the performers.
Silent films: As a continuation on the silent skits idea, the students created stop motion films using clay or Play-Doh. Their films had to be silent to help them to focus on telling a story using just actions.
Movie Projects: As their final project for this cycle, the teens divided into small groups to work on short films of about three minutes. The chose their plot idea and were instructed to write their story down beforehand, either on paper or using story boards. The short films were shown to their classmates in DesignIT Studio on December 15.
Introduction Day: The new group of DesignIT students from the Applied Learning Academy started their first official day by watching The Way Things Go, a video demonstrating an amazing chain reaction involving water, fire, and other materials. The staff presented an example of a chain reaction sculpture. The students built a basic chain reaction using dominos, tape, helium balloons, and other materials.
Soldering and Building: After school at ALA, the teens learn how to safely use a soldering iron, as well as build basic circuits and switches. These would be used later in their final chain reactions.
Complexity: As the students built competency with the soldering iron and circuit ideas, they were instructed to add switches and motors to chain reaction designs.
Saturdays with the Boys and Girls Clubs: Each club had a Saturday workshop at the museum during this cycle. The teens learned how to program crickets and invented new ways to incorporate them into the chain reaction sculptures they were building. During their normal times at the club and the museum, the teens worked on their final chain reaction sculpture, as well as gaining competency on various power tools. A certification system was implemented so that students would learn how to safely use the power tools and could demonstrate their proficiency to staff members.
Crickets: The ALA students worked on programming with crickets and learned how to involve them in the chain reactions. The students also learned about teamwork as each one worked on a link of a larger chain reaction.
Design: The teens began working on their final chain reaction sculpture by first sketching out a design of what they wanted their product to look like. The teens were also given a chance to start programming their crickets to use and gain more knowledge of safe power tool use.
Chain Reaction Final Project: Working in small groups, the students built their final chain reaction sculpture. They were required to use a switch, motor, cricket, dominos, and a helium balloon in their design, but were not limited to those items. The projects were linked together on December 15 for a showcase. Museum staff, museum guests, and fellow classmates attended the showcase, where the giant sculpture was run several times.
