We finished up the Kern County Museum proposal, finalizing the slide deck and interactive learning stations. The museum was excited about our ideas and had no feedback. Which is great for us! Unfortunately due to the timeline, we won’t be able to start fabrication until the fall, so I won’t be able to be a part of this project. However, it’s always fun to work in the blue sky phase. Through this experience, I learned a lot about energy sources and thinking about how to build simple learning experiences for complex topics.
Mood board for Sustainable City concept.
Given that camp was still in full swing this week, we were unable to work back at the office. Instead, myself and another intern worked on site developing a plan for the rest of the summer.
After the first week of camp, we realized that our Scratch & Makey Makey curriculum would not be feasible to execute with this camp given how difficult it was to run some of the more simple programs. This was as a result of a more hectic environment and how large class sizes were. So instead we decided to table that program, and work on really fully developing it.
Justin tasked us with designing a traveling activation piece that could be used to engage and educate students about building games with Makey Makey. It needed to be scalable in terms of age group and number of players, have a high thru-put, and be replayable.
We came up with two ideas:
A miniature kid-friendly travel version of Space Squad in Space (a story room designed by the corporate side of 2BC) - loosely inspired
Promotional image from 2BC website of Space Squad in Space.
A giant controller for a simple runner game - inspired by the giant NES controllers created by ETC students in 2004 for Building Virtual Worlds
Image from ETC website of giant NES controllers created by students during Building Virtual Worlds.
While the latter would be extremely easy to execute, we decided that it would be more of a fun and educational experience for ourselves to do the former. Cheers to masochism!
We started to write up our experience design doc and come up with the core story component of this experience. This was a short week due to the July 4th, so we were unable to get as much done as we had hoped. In addition, even though I wasn’t teaching anymore, the students still asked me to play with them during recess. How could I say no??