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By gaelen, March 4, 2010 8:54 pm

Thirty containers of playdough seemed like more than enough, but after a few rounds of claymation we only have a handful of containers left that aren’t dried up or covered in mold.  I didn’t realize a student brought their own one morning and accidentally ate a couple bites from her stash.  She wasn’t happy about it, but I think I got my point across.  I wish I kept the moldy playdough around for us to throw under a microscope, but we can always culture more gross things later.

One student in particular has really been pushing to make claydough.  Unfortunately cooking in the morning takes all the time we’ve got (45 minutes) and she usually gets to schools around 8:20am (breakfast ends at 8:40am).  For about a week she’d show up and ask if today was the day to make claydough, and I’d give her the bad news that she didn’t get to school early enough.  After a week of that, she started showing up a couple minutes earlier, out of breath, telling me she ran all the way to school.  Still not early enough to cook.  Well today she finally did it, she made it in by 8:00am.

This was the first time we cooked in the table in the hallway.  It was quite a mess.  Dry and wet flour and food coloring cover the table.  The hotplate still had batter on the coils from breakfast weeks earlier that left the hallway smelling like pancakes.  We finished just in time to get everyone to class.  One student didn’t want to wash her hands.  She almost managed to sneak into class without washing them.  I’m kind of with her on it, it would be fun to walk around with doughy purple hands all day, but I don’t think the teacher wants that tracked into their classroom.  This was the most excited I’ve seen the older kids in the morning.  The mess wasn’t too much for me to clean up after they went to class.  We’ll have to make more claydough tomorrow.

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By gaelen, March 2, 2010 8:08 pm

Snow storms are disrupting our regularly scheduled programs.  A handful of kids showed up for video game class the Saturday after a snow day.  Before I set them loose to design their own games, we spent some time talking about how to explain games to people.  A few didn’t know Pong and most didn’t know Space Invaders, but everyone knew Pac-man.

After we all confused ourselves trying to explain Pac-man with just words, I told them they could use the board if they wanted to.  Each sketch they drew had an important aspect that the other missed: power pellets, blinking ghosts, portals.  There was quite a bit of debate over what Pac-man is and is the ghosts actually kill him or just make him disappear.  I tossed up my own sketch at the bottom to show them that the whole board wasn’t necessary to explain the game.  We just need enough picture to explain the finer points.

A second grader insisted she had a clear and concrete vision and that it would be a waste of time to create a storyboard.  Who am I to stand in the way of a confident developer?  She had hand in the claymation earlier in the year too, so she’s already spent some time storyboarding.

The games they’re coming up with look neat.  The jetpack game actually sounds like something I played back on my 286 forever ago.  We had a 2-axis flight stick that really game the impression that I was flying a jetpack.  I’ve never hooked up a game controller to Scratch (just Scratch boards), but I’ll have to look into that to make their games that much more real.  The anteater game looks funny too.  Last year, one of the students made a rabid rabbit game that was a riot.  She drew all bunnies herself and gave them individual demented looks.  I’m going to upload all the games this time around so that they can email them around to friends and family and show their teachers.

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By gaelen, February 25, 2010 11:37 am

School was closed for the mid-winter break last week, but PAZ kept the building warm by offering a full day program all week.  Normally I only spend about 40 minutes with the kids in the morning.  I can’t manage time though, so this usually breaks down to 25 minutes.  that doesn’t leave a lot of time to do complicated things that don’t carry over from day to day like cooking.  With no first period, we were free take as much time as we needed (well, I did have to get to work eventually.  Sorry Daylife for showing up late all last week!)

I’ve wanted to cook with kids here for a while.  I started off helping out with a cooking class back when I was still pushing my way into schools and cook with older kids at a rec center from time to time.  One of the students brought in a science cook book a few weeks back, so we had no choice but to try out cooking.

We made breakfast food all week.  I worked with a handful of kids that don’t normally get to work with in the morning.  P.S. 24 has a morning enrichment/catch-up program that about half the kids attend.  I love mixing grades.  There was a second grader, a smattering of 3rd graders, and a fifth grader.  Toward the end of the week, the people in charge told me the second grader is teased and generally unaccepted by her class, and it was good to see her get along so well with the kids in the older grades.

We started off with scrambled eggs.  I brought in different flavors for everyone to try out – worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, truffle oil.  I had food coloring from an earlier project, so the girls thought it would be fun to color the eggs.  We gave the brain-looking eggs to the program director.  The kids squealed when she ate them.

The menu for the rest of the week consisted of French toast, fresh chocolate cinnamon whipped cream, banana and chocolate chip pancakes, feta and spinach omelets, and chili cilantro hash browns.  Except for a fried egg I made on the last day, the kids prepared and cooked all the food.  It was fun cooking and eating breakfast together.  They weren’t all entirely familiar with some of the food and ingredients we made, but younger kids are great about trying out new things.  A few of them told me they were going try cooking the dishes at home with their parents.  They all vied for the leftovers to share with their counselors.

Cooking was about as messy as I expected and completely time consuming, but I’m still going to try to squeeze it into our regular morning nonsense.

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By gaelen, February 12, 2010 6:06 pm

I noticed one of the second graders folding the top of her single-serving cereal into a little airplane, so I decided we should spend a couple weeks learning about airplanes and aeronautics.  We started off by building our own designs and seeing how they flew.  The second graders were much more experimental with their designs.

We weighed all sorts of paper to measure their mass and talked about how that factors into a good flight.  We went with phone book paper because it was the easiest to fold of the light papers.  They ran lots of test flights down the hall to see the difference between wing size and shapes and how weight affects flight time.  The tailed design was a big hit.  I want to build RC airplanes with them someday, but that’s a bit costly.  Maybe we’ll work on rockets next time.

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By gaelen, January 15, 2010 6:38 pm

Over the last few months pairs of 2nd and 3rd graders have tried their hand at claymation during breakfast and holiday classes.  For the most part, they were left alone to design the models and come up with a story.  We tried storyboarding at first just like video game design, but they liked keeping the story a work in progress.  Next time I’ll have to work with them to do voices.  One of the girls did a hilarious British accent for the wolf in The Three Little Pigs animation.

Nearly all the kids knew about the stop motion process from the show iCarly.  From what I know, iCarly’s brother was trying to make a claymation video, but people kept interrupting him or messing with his models.  This helped the kids understand the patience needed, but not necessarily the patience they were willing to give.  Toward the end I started having the kids practice animation rigid objects like juice boxes to give them an idea of the discrete movements needed to smooth animation.  We’re nearly out of Play-Doh (or clay-doh as the kids call it).  The next group will get a chance to cook up and color their own clay-doh.