Rise & Shine: A 7am Start

Earth Day started at 7am with everyone helping to construct the dome. The dome was custom-designed for Earth Day specifically and required true collaborative spirit to assemble the many small pieces together. Once we felt that this was going quite well, Raquel and I started fixing and setting up our Trash Trivia tent just before 9am.

Wind & Sailor Skills

Around this time was when I realised just exactly how windy the day was as we were trying to tie the bottom of the tent to sandbags to secure and prevent them from flying away. This required some real strength. As I went around the tent tying the bottom to sandbags every yard or so, my hands got cold, scratched, and rough like sandpaper. At some point, Raquel and I felt quite hopeless as it seemed that whatever we tried the tent still looked like a dress being blown up by the wind. The tying system we tried to implement seemed to be not working. Not only that the bottom of the tent was a problem, there was too much light coming in through the gap between the tent material making up the tent wall and the roof of the tent. We decided that one of us would have to go around the tent, lift it up at several points like a superwoman, and duct-tape the tent fabric to the metal rail at the top supporting the tent to ensure there is no gap at the top. Raquel did a great job of being the superwoman!

The Game Starts

When the game started, Iba was our first MC. He had the cheat sheet we sent out the week before on his phone and did a really great job of hosting the first game. Below is a short video showing his and another game.

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Although the wind was very strong, and it was cold, we still had lots of fun on the day and everyone who participated in our game seemed to enjoy it. I especially liked seeing both the parents and kids get excited about the game and, in some cases, seeing them compete against each other. One kid continued to play after his first game and ended up playing 3 out of the 4 games that we had prepared. There were two families at least that divided into two teams and competed against each other. As with any project, there were things that can be iterated on and improved for the next time but overall despite the cold and the wind, Trash Trivia managed to be an engaging game.

Thank You!

Thanks Iba and Ailish for coming out to be with us despite the weather, and thank you Anezka and Tammy for the mini happy hour after the event!

P.S. Below is a short 2 min video summing up our experience! We plan to show this film during our LCCS presentation as well.

Change of Plan

We did mini presentations this week about our journey making the projects materialize. Prior to the presentations I decided that the PowerPoint version of our game was too glitchy with too much delay between the different gifs playing, and to transfer the game onto a different platform – Unity. This was a good decision in the sense that the interactions and user interface could be designed to be much more intuitive.

Progress video:

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Halfway our presentation my laptop battery decided to suddenly die and it took us some time to get back on track. Below is the deck we prepared for the presentation:

GoogleSlides Deck

Main Takeaways

• Maturity is not bound by age
• Giving tasks/engaging the students in the making process kept them focused
• Contribution translates to ownership
• Idea generation by the students was really great. More work needed on materializing the ideas.
• Interestingly, the students alternated taking control of execution: Jeet -> Kamali -> Pearl -> Iba -> Ailish etc etc.
• Group dynamics was interesting to observe – friends can bounce ideas off each other and there is healthy competition between them, but at times being with your friends can also be distracting.

Food for Thought: Piagetian Learning

In one of the readings, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert, he talks about a specific type of learning called Piagetian learning. Piagetian learning is described as learning without curriculum, or learning that happens without deliberate teaching. The student is driven by their own curiosity to explore, play and create and through this experience they learn new things about the world, and their surroundings. In several ways I felt that the Trash Trivia experience was like the Piagetian learning described here. There was of course the general scaffolding put in place, but the students were completely free to materialise any project idea they come up with as long as they are enthusiastic about it and remain engaged. Trash Trivia morphed and progressed as the children made new discoveries: like how the questions need to be as fun as they are educational otherwise it gets boring, or that we cannot spend more than X number of minutes on one question otherwise everyone gets less engaged in the game and so on. There are many benefits to such an organic process; in my opinion the most important one is that the children learn to make decisions, and become independent learners. It’s a way of building resilience, an especially important factor given the uncertainty of our times.

But how do we balance giving direction and structure with giving freedom to explore and be creative, the kind of balance that ensures quality learning and quality project outputs?

Trash Trivia, and Ed Tech & Design Thinking in general, has been a great opportunity for me to start to tackle this question.

This happy face indicates – gotta use vpn, for some reason!

So, beginning of this week marked 5-minute presentations. These were quite indicative but, more or less, people went through what they went through. I, kinda hesitated. And in fact, I had an around 4-day break. Now that I think about it, it’s quite kinda funny although coming to look at the Samsung Health app with 19.5h of sleep recorded and then another 13 hours the next day. Probably not healthy but eventually getting some sleep ought to be. Now that I think about, it’s kind of a good time to reflect on actually how much work was involved in the last weeks. As my rescuetime ain’t rescuing anyone or anything but it’s pretty good at keeping track of what I do digitally and whether I’m wasting my time or actually (at least) trying to put it into a productive mode.

And so while it is quite challenging to exclude Ed Tech on its own and count how many hours were put towards it, I’d still say there would be a decent amount of ~25-35 hours weekly, with some turbulence to add or subtract, significantly at times. And then to top it off with ~2 hours of travelling back and forth to the school, by taking the bike I’d be faster and healthier, by taking public transit I’d be toppling off with good over 2 hours and less on my kangaroo bank account. But sometimes it’d be cold or rainy and the choice would become all of a sudden, narrower. In any case, it is really quite a nice chunk of time and effort and the school does tend to take all of it, once I look back.

Playtech Week

Can’t say all these hours were purely productive but as an indicative form-factor, it works and it’s nice to see the hardware I decided to invest in prior, remains actually surprisingly stable and reliable, pulling off anything I really required from it (here goes a hail to Microsoft). Other than that, why am I mentioning all the work that also was outside of the class? Because many of the skills I learned from outside I managed to apply here. Disregarding Rhino that I learned back 4 years ago, I got a refresher here at Parsons. Some of the interaction methods were based on coding that I either learned or self-learned to apply in this project. Many of the experimentation methods, motion capture. Technically, with each week I see I could potentially undertake much more but there as many hours we get to work on, well, work.

So, moving forward, what do we got, what do we do, what have I done? Well, I conceived a presentation into which I threw a few cools toys, some of the processes that I felt were worth mentioning and that perhaps were not broached earlier. While the process of transforming sketches into 3D models was, perhaps a bit more of a refresher, it seems the more subtle part of adding microplastics was not quite seen or understood, as simple as the thing was. In the end, that made the audience a bit interested. Going through some of the difficulties and what my main focus was. I didn’t feel like giving the presentation as there was more that I wanted to throw in but there’s as much as we can do, considering the time all get.

From the moving ahead, well, there’s actually a list I’ve written down:

– Cover larger swaths of terrain with grass

– Make the bottles spawn in a delayed manner after the narration stops and make it stop before the experience ends, change the colour to blue and place them further away to descend over the horizon

– Ongoing calibration in Unity/Madmappa

On Thursday it’s packing day, on saturday showcase and we’re apparently in charge of building da thin’. As in the dome and setting everything up in just a few hours. I hope the weather will turn nice? In any case, there will be a little more work to be done within Unity, perhaps a few updates but at this point, it’s rather just tweaks, agreeing on how much should the projection mapping cover, carry out final tests and voila, everything should be in place. Contingency is as well, just I don’t have a parsons t-shirt (gotta get one).

In any case, I wrote this blog in advance as I just know how much work in coming and how much I should be doing and it’s very likely delays will happen (now hopefully not anymore 🙂

Dome Deconstruction Timelapse

On April.22, each team did a 5-minutes presentation showing where they are. After the critique on our instruction card, we need to add some slogans to it so visitors can easily get what kind of experience is in the dome. We also tested our video using the projector in the dome for the final round testing, the side voice has a bit echo but it’s ok, it might get better with the speaker on Earth Day. Before Earth Day, we need to have everything finalized, including finalize the video with water sound, finalize both poster and instruction guide stand. Then, we talked about Earth Day schedule and transportation, we need to be there around 9 a.m. and set up our dome and projector. This week will be very productive and we are getting ready for Earth Day!