This week’s class was inhibited by the school-announced snow day. Many students met over Zoom. I did not see the emails that invited us to this meeting and had to be informed later of what was discussed. We went over our game-ideas and were given feedback. Bolor and I had decided the previous week that we would work together and come up with a couple games we could pose to the LCC students. We had played around with the idea of a game centered around Plastic Soup (a character would have to place items into the bowl, not knowing if the material was edible or plastic). The game is a commentary on the decisions that many sea creatures face – plastic or edible? The next game was inspired by the Giving Tree and would involve a scavenger-hunt element to ‘heal’ the tree by taking out the plastic within the tree. Bolor and I created a presentation along with prototypes to show LCC students.
Process Blog
Earth Day – Jess
Hello,
Going to earth day I had a few jobs to get done:
- Do every single group’s poster
- Sound for my group: Oceanic Odyssey
For the sound, I had used an underwater sound file that I edited for it not to be copyrighted by changing the levels of the three minute audio clip. With that in hand, we talked to the kids on Zoom and discussed that along with an underwater sound, it would be more helpful to have one of the kids to do a voice over with fun facts so it becomes a more educational experience. Because we were so tight in time between PlayTech and Earth Day, we decided that instead of focusing too much on researching the fun facts, to go a different route. At the end, for earth day, we ended up using the original underwater sound from PlayTech with a voiceover of the kids narrating instructions for the audience inside the dome.
I was also in charge of designing AND printing everyone’s posters! At first I underestimated this because for PlayTech I just designed the posters by using a simple template I created and looking up illustrations on my own and having a lot of creative freedom.
This then became a big assignment for me for Earth Day because I had to be on top of everyone for sending me their group’s information, which included the following:
- Group’s name
- STUDENT NAMES + KID’S NAME
- A CATCH LINE FOR THE PROJECT
- Illustrations that kids had drawn for their group
The problem was that a few groups didn’t have the time to submit this information to me, so I had to be creative on what I can do with their group, or ask my professors for help.
With this at hand, I then created the first round of posters for Earth Day. I received over 10 different feedback rounds over the course of the 24h before Earth Day. This was really stressful, but paid off!
Once the posters were done, it was printing time! Printing was a huge problem because the plotters were broken at the UC, so we spent over $100 on printing credits only, and about four hours printing and cutting and putting the papers together. It was extremely tiring.
Then: EARTH DAY
Earth Day for me was a very exhausting and very well accomplished day.
I woke up at 4:30, got ready, took the train down to Union Square at 5:20 to meet up with Harry Castro at Union Square. We then met and made our way to New Jersey. We got there around 7:00 and found nobody but Raquel there.
After waiting around 30 minutes for everyone to show up, we went right into action on moving the dome, then setting it up.
For setting up the dome, I helped Harry with tying up the zip ties on the wood.
I also helped with putting everyone’s posters onto cardboard boxes Tammy brought us- which some, were destroyed by the wind :[
After hours of work and turning the projector on for my group: Oceanic Odyssey, it was game time!
We started having people in, and my main jobs inside the dome were:
- Hit the play and pause button for every group that came in.
- Get people to tell me what they see, what they can do about the trash in the ocean, if they were happy with what they were seeing, etc. Basically: engaging people to actively think about why we were doing this.
Earth day was an incredible experience because I really got to feel what real team work is, and also seeing people engaging with a project I’ve been apart of for a whole semester was extremely satisfying. Earth Day was also exhausting because of the amount of hours and work we put in during that day. And of course, the nasty weather I will never forget.
Earth Day
Earth was was a magical day. Chaotic at times, especially while setting up. Trash Trivia has some technical difficulties with sound – we had to try several different speakers – and were in a rush to get set up in time. The wind was ferocious and seemed attempt to blow our tents away! We ended up started a bit late, but once we did it was wonderful to see our team of LCC students that were willing to host the game and grab their friends. There were points where it was slow, and cold windy weather did not help. It was all worth it when we had excited kids in the tent that were really into the game! The surprised faces once certain questions were revealed was also a highlight! Overall, I felt the day went well and each group presented an experience that was unique and beautiful.
Week 12.5: Earth Day!
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.
Earth day
Earth Day Blog
On Saturday, a windy day to kick start with earth day, and presumably, that is the earliest morning of my life. We initiated our first task-the dome, due to the unexpected weather from the night before the dome was left and deconstructed in the tent to ensure the performance on earth day. We began with the skeleton and move along to the reinforcement by adding the wood sticks. And finally warped with fabric shield, the whole process was relatively challenging under the high wind conditions, everyone has to pay attention to the details in case collapse of the dome. Meanwhile, I and my teammates milo start to set up our own group unit, our original intent is to use VR thru Samsung Gear, whereas, I did not test prior to the earth day and gear has an issue which its low ram that cannot load our over the complexed file. Hence, we have no choice but switch to plan B by using a display. And by the time of noon, people start to come in, we have attracted great amount of crowds. overall, it was thrilling experience, from studio to stage.
Earth Day🌎⚡️✨🌿
This semester the EdTech class was intense, and Earth Day was the climax.
The days before earth day were also intense. The build-down of the dome, load of the cars, the night printing before Earth Day.
It all built up to that early and windy Saturday morning in which after a few moments of confusion, it started to flow and make a lot of progress regardless of the really scary winds who were the elephant in the room and nobody would say it but it was true: our things will fly anytime and we’ll all be very screwed up.
With that said I’ve never seen more team work since I played fútbol when I was in school. Moving the dome, building the dome, resolving each other’s issues, putting up the posters, finding tape, anything was valid, everyone was helping. Even José helped through FaceTime. This fun fact was kind of unnoticed because SO MUCH was going on but honestly… that is kind of the epitome of what this class was… a collaborative effort physically present in New Jersey in conjunction with online audiovisual internet telecommunications for our projects sake. It’s just hilarious that happened, I’m surprised but I shouldn’t, welcome to Anezkas’s and Tammy’s EdTech Class.
I spent most of the time inside the dome because I was deeply afraid the wind was gonna push the tripod with the mirror, or even just move it and compromise the experience. It was definitely a fun experience, specially at the most crowded moment of the day we had a couple of screenings filled with kids who would be so engaged with the projected experience that it made the screenings feel short and of course, they included claps at the end of each show which was just heart warming. Also an old man who said he worked for the Hudson Estuary or something like that and found the experience of the dome really important and with a big relevant message.
I think overall the experience was highly memorable, regardless of all the troubles, the weather, the time and the stress to have every project be functional. It was definitely something I’ll never forget and a learning experience of team work between kids, adults and in-betweens.
Of course in the end what had to happen happened…
Cheers for the Earth, Education and Tech.
Week 13 After
Welcome to Jersey, a beautiful land… park? Well, it was beautiful, although upon my first encounter: rainy, cloudy and cold. Especially the subsequent day once it was freezing cold and windy and constructing everything was taking long. So long. So did the deconstruction. But constructing it was much more of an effort than expected.
Fingernails busted, totally unprepared, late-nights at the school to finish wrapping up semester loose ends. Eventually leading up to a very windy and a cold day on which we had quite some fun constructing the dome once again. Think about it, if the wind blows and you’re constructing a dome that is lightweight, is made of wood and material that just carries wind, then it’s a bit of a problem isn’t it? With us repositioning the dome and trying to keep it steady in so many ways with sandbags, bags and other provisional material, it all came down to a satisfactory finish as it was raised and ready to go. I thought it would be a bit warmer within the dome at first but the wind was so strong that I really got stone cold and tired to the point I just took a sit and… fell asleep for a while.
In any case, eventually we managed to set up the projector and calibrate all to work properly. It took longer than expected to get it all up and running and so by noon, we decided to get it going, as the projection spanned across most of the Dome and the calibration seemed to have reached its limits, especially that incoming and exterior light remained an issue we had to combat in a variety of ways.
Oh, also I forgot to mention, we had bagels and coffee. Although I had donuts on my way to the spot.
Once it was all dun, I figured my watch has ended and so I decided to check on other tents and pass on the torch of other group members handling the operation. While it could feel a bit strange to do this way, I could just not simply remain in the same spot as I was reaaally cold. So I visited a few other tents, managed to eat some protein bars and pretty good tacos and then I realised that our dome was generating traffic. And that was a good sign. One that would remain as such up till the closing hours around 3, when our team kept on saying that we’re wrapping up but 10 more sessions took place as people just wanted to see it. Considering the mapping was for about 3 minutes and the tent would take about 10 people in-n-out, I would say about 500 people might have come across the projection mapping.
At a later stage I would inspect the dome and it look relatively good, the problem was the projection being skewed but the main components worked and made people in awe. I guess that’s the most satisfying part of all the work done in past weeks.
Earth Day
On April.27 – Our Big Day!
We finally finished our dome set up at noon, it was hard but fun to do teamwork! My favorite moment of Earth Day is the construction part, it was nice that Milo found a clipper so I can work fast. My least favorite part is the weather, the wind at Liberty State Park is extra cooler than Manhattan. I’m glad inside of the dome is warm, so we can better interact with visitors. At the end of the day, people were all ready to leave because the weather got cooler. However, we actually attracted more people by “yelling” in the end. During the show in the dome, I helped guide people into the dome and interact with kids. It was nice to see our Oceanic Odyssey project in public and see how strangers reacted after the experience. Most of the visitors were amazed by our idea of using different colors, and they also learned to not use plastic bags after seeing our underwater scenes.
Week 12: Mini Presentations
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:
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.
Earth Day!
It was really cold and windy. While building the dome, we were constantly fighting with the wind to keep it from blowing away. 8 weights were used to hold it down and the door kept flapping away. Due to the nature of projections needing darkness, we had to add a drape to the top and assign one person to keep the door in place. Many of the small things that we were debating about prior to the event became insignificant.
Aside from that, the process was really fun and we had a pretty good participant turn out. It was interesting to see how individuals responded to the content in the two worlds and their reaction when they discovered the difference. for the younger kids, many at first said that they preferred the red polluted world because it was more vibrant but once they discovered the content, they changed their minds about it. It was also surprising to see how supportive of recycling and reducing plastic the parents are.
Overall, it was a very memorable event.
