Summer Camp

Edwin Pilobello e_pilobello at attbi.com
Tue Jun 11 00:51:58 PDT 2002


Awesome!  I will try these ideas.

QUESTION :  How do you get more girls to sign up for a computer
programming class/camp?  Saturday Academy has a lot of restricted funds
targetted for 1) getting girls into nursing, 2) getting girls into
science, engineering and math.

They sure would like to use those funds successfully.

Cheers,
Edwin

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-squeakland at squeakland.org
[mailto:owner-squeakland at squeakland.org] On Behalf Of thom
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2002 11:29 PM
To: squeakland at squeakland.org
Subject: RE: Summer Camp


On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Edwin Pilobello wrote:

> Of course it's going to be fun!  Sometimes it's hard fun.
> 
> The hat trick is inspiring them to create a design document. Double 
> the difficulty level for OOD.

start out with anything by Scott McCloud. Maybe show them 'ghost World'
or 'from Hell' and explain storyboards from that perspective. they will
get it immediately and then you explain that the 'comic' also needs
notes for all sorts of sounds and interactivity. If they are real young
maybe start them with 'Miss Spider's Tea Party' which is a great picture
book and then show them the Cd which was created from the Book. there is
a great storyboard/design doc example for Ludtke's Bad At The Midway.
Lots of stuff on Gamasutra.com. Maus, the book, and Maus the Cd is
pretty good. Show the movie Final Fantasy, the book 'The Making of' and
then run the game on a PS2.

I have done this with kids from 10 to 50; age almost doesn't matter. I
have tons of this stuff from my grad students and find that I can take a
grad design doc and show it to kids 15 and up and they get the idea and
will create a document as good as the grad level document.

I get them to run ideas by giving them index cards and limiting them to
50 word ideas with 'no names', very important that no one can be
identified when running ideas. Shuffle the deck, break them up into
groups of 4-5 and tell them you want the 1 good idea in the pack. Some
will come back with 1, some with more than 1 and some with none. You do
this two days in a row in the morning and by the 3rd day 2-3 of the kids
will be coming in with bunches of ideas. Figure out if the idea is a
story or an interactive.

Make them show at the end of the camp to mom & dad and any one you can
round up. 

--Thom




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