Familiar Faces

This was actually the first day of our after school program and I have to admit that I was quite surprised when I walked in. It turned out that almost all the students were ones who had participated in last years design club. This left me with a reassuring feeling that what we had started last year had stuck with the students, they had enjoyed working with us, and come back for another semester. This also helped create a more comfortable atmosphere for a first day meeting since I knew most of the students and they knew me. What is even funnier is that out of the three students that weren't in the program last year two of them had been in my group the week prior. We started with the "name game" you know where you pick a word which is associated with the first letter of your name. I think that the kids really enjoyed the activity and whats funny is that middle-schoolers had a better memory then the college students. In fact they had to help us out which turned this into a really great participation activity for the kids. Next we headed to the computer lab to do a carbon footprint calculator. I think that this was a great place to start with teaching the students about ecological concepts and really got them thinking about how significant their footprint is compared to other countries. The student that I worked with wanted to go through and see what the difference was when we picked the best options and worsted and he even knew what had a negative or positive effect on the footprint which was great. When we finished the carbon footprint calculators we asked the kids some question about what they thought, one of the girls commented on how ambiguous the question were and next time she would want to do one which was a little more detailed so this was great to hear from someone so young. Of course some students didn't get as involved with the calculators and were more interested in the daily game that they had pirated on to the computers but overall this was a good first day and got the ecological ball rolling.

Ben