After missing what could have turned into a super productive making day because of the snow day, we headed to LCCS for our week 6 session with the students fully prepared with lots of ideation exercises.

The LCCS and Parsons students got paired/mixed with each other to complete a series of mini ideation exercises involving drawings, discussions and narrative development. One thing I realised that really stayed with me from this session is how mature the LCCS kids actually are! Although we all knew this from the beginning that they are grade 6, 7, 8 students, I feel like I have been treating them to much like little kids, in effect missing out on an opportunity to have more serious conversations with them about the environment.

Nevertheless, our idea sharing/synthesizing/vote session went quite well in my opinion. All of the students I spoke to were excited about their ideas when explaining their stories/characters to me and they all really listened when I told them about my character. As we all spoke to at least 4-5 other students, we ended up with lots of ideas: the originals and the combined hybrids. This meant many of the new (and old) ideas had to be discarded or somehow synthesized into the new/selected ones. One girl on my team came up with a beautiful story about a seal-princess and suggested we incorporate shadow puppet effect in the project that she knows how to do, in effect creating a performance. This was the last idea I worked on during the ideation session so we put the idea down as our proposal for others to vote on. It didn’t receive many votes, mostly because I think there were other projects already going viral amongst the older boys and kids catch onto these things very quickly ahihi.

Below: My character turtle boy who goes on a quest to collect all the resources needed to build a device that can tell the difference between jellyfish and plastic bag.

Just before we started the ideation session:

 

I joined the Trash Trivia team which I thought was a team with the most straightforward idea. The challenge for us going forward would be to rebrand the trivia/jeopardy/family feud styles that were proposed to fit the earth day theme while at the same time keeping the questions both fun and informative/educational. Finding this balance I think would be the hardest especially since trivias and game show styles are already very popular among the general population and introducing completely new elements may throw things off too much. At the same time, the popularity of these shows also make the Trash Trivia idea already very attractive to the public, as can be easily seen from the way the idea went viral in seconds during our ideation session.

I’m looking forward to developing Trash Trivia further!