Breakfast classes started last week.   Back in January I started breakfast classes in the morning to work with students that couldn’t make it in to the science club in the after school program.  I recruited four 5th graders and two 4th graders and split them into groups of three.  The groups  met Mondays & Thursdays or Tuesdays & Fridays from 8:00am to 8:40am a table at the end of the hall way.  We built a few projects (LED valentines, piano glove, electric guitar), but didn’t work through them as quickly as I had hoped.  Science club in PAZ (the after school program) also suffered the same problems.  I’m hoping the changes to breakfast classes structure will fix the problems we had last year and increase overall throughput and make it more fun for everyone.

Before classes started this year, I spent a couple weeks talking with the kids during breakfast in the cafeteria.  I mostly wanted to get to know the kids a little better, but it also gave me a chance to see who shows up early.  I restructured the class to be five days a week with one group learning at a time.  The groups will be small (4-5 students) and meet from 8:00am to 8:40am Monday through Friday.  Projects will be organized for one or two week increments.  Girls only too.

Our first set of classes is on video game programming.  I started with two 3rd graders and two 5th graders.  One of the 5th graders is bored with it and the other doesn’t always show up on time, so now it’s three 3rd graders.  Two of them are picking up the techniques pretty quickly, or at least they are can follow directions.  Hopefully by the end of the week they’ll have the fundamentals down to start designing their own game next week while I work with the 5th graders on a different lesson.  I don’t know if this pipeline approach will work, but it’s worth a shot to increase student project throughput.

I could tell CX was bored with game programming.  I think she kept showing up because she knows I have other projects to come.  I assured her that we’re starting another project for 5th graders on Monday and that it’ll only take a week to complete, not like those 3 months projects from last year.  She seemed excited by the prospective projects and staying out of the game design lessons.  KM, another 5th grader, comes late to school and isn’t keeping up with the game lessons.  She doesn’t like eating the cafeteria though, so she’s flipping through my sewing tech books and picking out projects that interest her.  Tomorrow I’m going to show her a video from Diana Eng’s Fairytale Fashion project and see if she wants to send in any ideas.

I’m going to try translating all my posts into Spanish.  I need to learn the language and this gives a good way to practice.  I’ve never studied the language before, so they’ll probably be pretty rough.  Gotta start somewhere I guess.