genzai·chi

The case of the stolen trophy, part 2

Part one here, related posts here. Click on images to see the larger versions on Flickr.

The cryptic sign spotted in the newsagents near to school

The sign points to a video and the sums reveal a password

Have you got what it takes? from sneakysneak on Vimeo.

Writing individual stories

Working as a team to gather ideas for the stories

The stories are good enough! We get a list of more video links…

A message for Team Alpha from sneakysneak on Vimeo.

The videos are of clues in Morse code

Hunting for the hidden clues

A clue is found taped under the top of the railing in the walkway

The clues fit together to form a map of the school and field

We eliminate all but two of the crosses on the map, then go onto the field to investigate

Not this one: the map said to try the larger of the two options

The case of the stolen trophy, part one

Having previously been trained up as special agents, it was only a matter of time before the Year 3 and 4 pupils at Bredon Hancock’s school received their first mission.

Yesterday morning, whist reading through their weekly newsletter – the Bredon Bugle – the agents noticed a strange article which they recognised as being in some sort of code.

Coded message in the Bredon Bugle

They phoned me and by the time I had rushed out of my office in iGenCa HQ and driven over to join them, they had donned their special agent ID badges, got out their investigation packs, started work with their code wheels and begun to decode the message. After a little bit of work, this is what we found it said:

To the bird of the night,
and another brightest blue.
I have taken something
That belongs to you.

Have you got what it takes,
To unravel the mystery?
You’ll need teamwork and brains,
Or your item is history.

Your entry point,
is where it begins.
Your imagination and mine:
Let’s see who wins…

It didn’t take us long to figure out that “bird of the night, and another brightest blue” was a reference to the agents in their normal pupil roles as Owls and Kingfishers, but what did the rest of the message mean?

I called a team to help me work through the rest of the verses and someone suggested that ‘entry point’ could mean the main entrance to the school. Another agent had spotted some new state-of-the-art security cameras had been installed in that area, so we went out to have a look.

We located two of these cameras and decided we would have a look at the files on them to see if they had caught anything useful on tape.

They had!

The first one we watched showed us a person (that we recognised from previously intercepted footage) breaking into the school and then leaving again having wrapped something up and put it in her rucksack. She had some sort of device that zapped the camera though, so we couldn’t see everything.

When we looked at the footage from the other camera (that the intruder hadn’t spotted or zapped) it helped answer some of our questions: she had taken the sports trophy!

Here’s the combined footage from both cameras that shows what happened:

CCTV footage of the intruder from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Now the coded message from the Bugle made a lot more sense! We also knew we had to get permission to launch a full-blown mission, so our next task was to summarise what had happened in a report to Agent A to explain why it was important for us to investigate this.

Mission initiation report. What do we need to put in it?

One of the special agents sets out what had happened that morning

We sent the reports off, but then realised we had to act fast if we were to be able to interview someone who was likely to provide some key evidence in our investigation: Mrs Greenwood the cleaner went home after lunch so we had to speak to her fast!

Here’s what was written on the paper:

• Research challengers
• Are they are good enough?
• Think of a way to test them
• Be sneaky
• See what they do and who they tell?
• Are they a good team?
• Wait for contact
• ???

What were we to make of that?

While we were thinking, a message came back from Agent A giving us permission to go ahead with the mission. We used the school’s recording devices to interview the head mistress (who had information about the security cameras) and the secretary (who had information about what state her office was in when she arrived at work that morning).

From what the cleaner and the secretary had told us, we decided to see if we could lift any fingerprints from the scene of the crime. First we practised getting prints from our own fingers and then a few of us went to look in the foyer to see if we could get any off the remaining trophies, the door or the reception hatch.

Examining the fingerprints on the large trophy

Unfortunately we were unable to lift any of these prints, but we had a really close look and decided that the ones on the door and the hatch were probably the same.

From the to-do list that the intruder dropped, we knew she was watching us to see who we would tell about what had happened.

I was unable to join the special agents today, but I believe they were compiling a special edition of the Bredon Bugle to tell EVERYONE.

Special agent training camp: debrief interviews

Another post relating to Phase 1 of delivery of an Agent N project designed to inspire creative writing and foster curiosity amongst a group of Y3 and Y4 pupils.

Whilst the pupils were winding up the training camp with a piece of reflexive writing, I took the opportunity to take a couple of them outside for a bit of feedback on the goings-on of the previous two days.

Rather than shoving a microphone in their face, I used some binaural microphones that look like earphones and just wore them around my neck. I’m repeating most things they say because I wasn’t sure if the mic was picking them up or not!

Here are the results:

Special agent training camp: video reports

Last week I spent the first 2 of what will be approximately 6 days working with the Year 3 and 4 classes at Bredon Hancock’s Endowed First School in rural Worcestershire.

My brief was initially to “inspire their children and staff to write with imagination, creativity, enthusiasm and confidence”, but this has since (I think in part as a result of conversations at my interview, which I did in role as Agent N) been expanded out to also try and foster a spirit of creativity, experimentation and enquiring minds in a more general sense. Staff and pupils.

I’ve worked on several Agent N projects up until now: immersive experiences taking place over 3-5 days in which the pupils have an overarching challenge to work on and, as a part of this, investigate different areas of the curriculum. Whilst I’ve had enormously positive feedback on the effects of these, I think there’s still plenty of scope for improvement, so with this project I have changed the structure to explore ways in which to hand some of the authorship back to the children. This has resulted in the delivery being split up into sections. Last week was the first of those sections: a 2-day special agent training camp.

Relinquishing some of the design decisions started well in advance of the delivery time in school when I recruited a friend – 8-year-old Agent M – to help me prepare a video for the trainees to respond to.

The message from Agent A requesting that we look at the top secret footage

I wanted a video of an operative in action. The action involved had to be exciting and intriguing, but not so prescribed that the the pupils in school couldn’t come up with a large range of different interpretations. I had a few locations in mind, but the filming was done as part of a weekend away with friends, so even those decisions had to be flexible.

Here’s the result after some basic prompts for Agent M to run with plus a bit of video editing:

operative from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

I’ve never seen 40 children sat with such rapt attention before!

We played the video a few more times, pausing in places to give the trainee agents a chance to write down any important details or questions in their special agent notepads.

After a bit of discussion to get a general idea of what they thought was going on, the children were asked to write up their reports for Agent A.

A trainee agent prepares their report...

Here are a few excerpts (spellings etc corrected):

In the film there was a girl disguised as a young child. At the start the girl was at an airport. At a machine she got some tickets. The code was AQZP. After she caught a plane and got dropped off at a wood. Why did she feel the tree?

The lady typed in AQZP. She walked up to a plane netting and stopped. The man walked to the plane. The lady ran to a tree and found a bag with a book in it. It might have been a clue. She ran to a farm track and stopped and ran a bit more and stopped again then suddenly pointed at a farm house. She ran down to a beach and crouched down to touch the sand. She was concentrating on the texture of the sand. Then she ran to a castle on a hill. I think she might be an agent on a mission.

She was wearing black and she looked like she was on a top secret mission. She typed into the computer AQZP which looked like a code. She thought carefully about what she was doing as if the time was running out. She recorded stuff in her notepad. She thought carefully about stuff she found and used it to help her. She looked around carefully in case anyone watched. She looks as if the time was running out and she had to go with the flow. She was just guessing and running. She wrote something into the sand. She felt the tree as if the tree had put it there.

Agent Harry's report on the video

On the DVD I think that there was a girl in an airport and she went there. A cash machine or ticket machine and then she looked at the plane and went to a woodland when a plane went overhead. I don’t think she wanted to be seen because she was sneaking. She picked up a bag and ran to the beach and made a sign in the sand. It was something like this [picture of an arrow]. She was disguised as an old gran. She had glasses like this [picture of glasses].

Agent Jemma's report

I think that the code at the beginning was that she was ordering some clues to find where she needs to go next. Next thing she was taking facts about the airport. Trying to get the right plane. Missed the plane. I think that she was undercover because she has glasses and a hoody.

I saw some dead drops that the agent was finding. It was an agent on a mission I think or she was finding information. An agent was on a computer on Flybe. In the corner of the screen I saw a word that was WHSmiths. The agent at the end was a bad agent finding clues about the good agent. I can’t work out why the agent at the end was feeling a tree and feeling the sand. The agent was writing the code AQZP to get permission.

The report from Agent Cara

Ideas from these reports and from other pieces of writing generated over the training camp will be used in the next phase of delivery…

Maths, but not as we know it…

I was shocked when this lady ran into the room & said COME INTO THE HALL NOW- THIS IS TOP SECRET. We suddenly found out that our teachers were all agents named Agent squirrel, Agent pants, Agent ants & Agent elliephants. I enjoyed learning this misson it was interesting to see all our teachers undercover. I learnt how to break codes in the afternoon & we got two clues that tell us what is the answer to this mission & it carries on going and going until we find the last clue. I am excited but i am little bit nervous because we only have 3 days.

Agent CB

In the morning when Miss Yates had just taken the register agent N came in and she said EMERGENCY!!! COME TO THE HALL QUICK I was really excited but when we were walking in the corridors we had to make sure that we were undercover so we had to act normal and when we had got to the hall agent N told us that we were on a mission to find some clues to solve the mission.Then we had to go back to are classrooms and we had to solve some clues and we got some clues just in the time of 15 minutes and the first clue was , near a mans whos’s insides you could clearly see and we had to find a map and each class had part of the map and if we put it together it would make the whole map. Today I have learned that if we all work together as a team the mission would be done quicker because we only have 2 days left.

Agent AW

I have realy enjoyed day 1 of (Sssshhhhhh) code breaking I can not I repeat (can not) wait until tomorrow.
And I cant wait to see the map again because it realy I repeat (realy) looks like fun also I thought what we might have to do with the map cause it looks allot like a treasure map.So we might have to find another clue or something.

cant wait for tomorrow
see you, yours greatfully
L (byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee)

Agent LJ

(All these examples were added to a forum on the school’s Virtual Learning Environment after school had finished.)

People in; slightly different people out

Museums as experience machines

So far my 2010 has been very focussed on schools and learning as I first spent a week responding to the second wave of Creative Partnership calls for this academic year and then attending interviews as a result.

Roughly half of the interviews I am invited to involve having to deliver a short activity (10-20 minutes) to a small group of the children. Considering my whole approach to projects is based on collaboration and a particular process aimed at responding to each individual context, it’s quite strange to find myself being judged on solo delivery of something workshoppy to a group I’ve not had any previous contact with!

I’d like to think that with my cross-disciplinary background one of my main selling points is that with pupil-led projects I’m pretty well equipped to be able to bring in practical skills that relate to wherever we end up. This too makes it tricky to decide on just one activity to represent me, because I’m not working from a starting point of offering a particular medium in response to a brief. Again all about the process.

Anyhoo, irony of the situation aside, these activities can be very interesting in their own right.

On Monday I was in a school that was looking for someone to help facilitate Year 5 (9-10 years old) in designing and making their “Museum of Water”. I was really interested in this call because of the way it had been presented as very pupil-led and also because, through my work with pervasive games and hackerspaces, I’ve been involved in various conversations coming from museum professionals that resonate strongly with those of schools. We all want meaningful interactions.

15 minutes isn’t really enough time for introductions and then anything much in the way of making, so I decided to aim for something much more feasible …like a paradigm shift!

I wanted the school to see their museum-to-be not as a collection of objects, or of documentation of learning objectives, but as a process. People go into the museum and the museum has some sort of effect on them such that the people leaving the museum are slightly different to when they went in. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I started the session in my favourite manner – by getting things wrong.

Hi, my name’s Nikki and I do all sorts of creative stuff. I’m here because I saw your advert for someone to help you make a Museum of Water.

Well, I thought that was really very easy, so I just went ahead and made it for you. [places 2 litre lemonade bottle partially filled with water on table]

Can I have my £3000, please?

[Silence]

Oh, hang on!

[Places bottle on top of cardboard box pedestal]

[Silence accompanied by glances]

What’s wrong? Can I have my money please?

From this starting point, we were able to have a conversation where the pupils explained to me that, even if I labelled the water, just to have a bottle of water on display wasn’t good enough – they wanted a museum that was interactive and taught people interesting things. They weren’t very impressed with my offering at all.

My next move was to invite everyone down to the other end of the room where I had cleared some floorspace. Within the context of what they had just told me, I introduced the idea that I wanted them to think of their museum as an experience machine. I wasn’t interested in what was inside it right now, but I wanted to think of who went in, and what we wanted them to be like when they left.

Quick profiles of incoming and outgoing museum visitors

Two of the children lay down on some large pieces of paper and struck appropriate poses whilst we drew around them. First of all we gathered around the outgoing visitor and noted and sketched our thoughts about what we wanted people to be doing and feeling after visiting our museum. I was really impressed at the contributions made in what I think was less than 5 minutes.

At one point I announced I was going to write down the obvious and added “happy”. This triggered a conversation about whether we would ever want people to leave the museum feeling sad. Yes they said: there were some very serious things relating to the topic of water and they might want people to be moved by these. When I asked for an example, one boy said that sometimes people drown in water. We agreed it would be important to teach people how to be safe.

With very little time left, we quickly added some thoughts to the picture of the incoming visitor. These were very illuminating in terms of how they perceived museums. Or how they thought museums were perceived – anyway, a very stark difference to the very positive picture they had painted in the previous two activities!

And that was the end of the session ..or it was supposed to be: it took a bit of effort to get the children to stop adding to the picture!

A few pupils helped me take photos of the drawings before I departed (I left the originals with the school – along with the bottle of water, for which I kindly waived the £3000 fee). Below is a slideshow of some of the images…

They’ve set themselves some very high standards in light of what appears to be a somewhat challenging target audience – I hope they can realise them.

The Grid at Mowmacre Hill Primary School

I was asked if I would run some workshops as part of Mowmacre Hill Primary School’s Creative Learning Day – a day aimed at trialling a range of creative learning activities and developing the pupils’ role in the planning, reflection and evaluation stages of Creative Partnerships projects.

Working in mixed-age ‘research groups’, each consisting of 30 pupils, the children were exploring the following 5 areas of creativity:

• Envisaging what might be
• Questioning and challenging
• Making connections and seeing relationships
• Exploring ideas and keeping options open
• Reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes

So, I needed to provide an activity that would work with children aged 5-11 years old and would provide a framework for the areas of creativity. After some discussion with the Creative Agent (representative from Creative Partnerships) we decided to use a version of Emergent Game.

Given that at least 50% of the adults who play Emergent Game pay to keep hold of their avatars, I thought it would be prudent to change the format to one that didn’t involve soft toys!

A selection of mysterious liquids

Inspired by the workshop we did at hanare project in Japan last year, where we ran out of toys and one of the players used a glass of water instead, I decided to theme it around some mysterious liquids…

I was also keen to build on the immersive experience work I did earlier this year at Linden Primary School, and experiment with how key strategies from that might be scaled down into something much smaller. In this case, a workshop lasting about an hour.

Starting off in a room next door to where I had laid out the grids, I first introduced myself as a secret agent. I wasn’t allowed to tell them much about my job, other than that we were on the lookout for fresh talent to join my department in the years to come.

I gave them a description of the sort of people we were looking for:

• People who can notice the smallest details.
• People who can think the biggest ideas.
• People who can tell the best stories.
• People who can imagine the wildest dreams.

I then informed them we would be doing a series of missions as a sort of a job interview, and I would be watching to see who had the skills we were interested in.

We also wanted people who were good at team work, so I gave them 1 minute to get into pairs (preferably with someone from a different year). After that, I told them our missions would be based around investigating some mysterious liquids. The scientists in my department had no idea what these liquids were, so we needed the pupils to figure out what the stories might be so the scientists knew where to start with their research.

The mysterious liquids were all in a rucksack and the teams of special-agents-in-training did a lucky dip to get the one they would be investigating. Whilst the bag made its way towards the back of the group and after the initial exclamations of “its just water” had been heard, I reiterated the four skills, asking after each one if they thought “its just water” would be the sort of thing we were looking for. Generally, they thought not!

The Grid

With all the mysterious liquids distributed, we moved next door into the mission laboratory and gathered around the edge of the grid. Here I explained the first mission:

Profile:
What is the name of your liquid?
Where is it from?
What is the best thing it has ever done?

From this standing start, the children only had about 3 minutes to come up with the seeds of a back story for their mysterious liquids.

They did me proud with intergalactic waters of several different sorts; healing octopus blood; water from a river-and-washing-up-liquid accident; jelly from London that would make you powerful and water from Antarctica that looked innocent enough, but only the two agents working with it had the special eyesight to see what it really was…

It poisons you because a part of the moon has fallen into it...

Where some of the older kids were sniggering and wanting to say their mysterious liquids were urine, I called their bluff and demanded more details.

Frog wee/wii collected by a farmer over the course of one day

Next – to some embarrassment from aforementioned sniggering kids – was the reporting-back session, where each team told the rest of the group what they thought their mysterious liquid was. This gave me a chance to make sure everyone was entering into the spirit of things and identify the very few who were unable to see anything more than a bottle of water. It also meant that everyone could see what sort of standard was being set and what they had to match up to.

Next I unleashed the remaining missions: one asking them to write a postcard from their mysterious liquid to one of the other mysterious liquids; one asking them to design a creature that might live in the liquid, giving me information about what it looks like, how it moves and how it breathes; one asking about what it might have been used to wash clean; and one explaining where the liquid might (and might not) like to hang out in school.

The creature-designing mission was by far the most popular mission, but again the pupils did amazingly well, with most of them completing all four missions in something like 15 minutes.

We concluded with a second reporting back session lasting about 10 minutes in which each team was asked to share their best mission.

Here is a slideshow of some of the mission cards that were produced during the three workshops:

It was great for me to be able to run the game (although I never actually called it that in front of the pupils) 3 times back-to-back, because it meant I was able to try different formats and tweak things that weren’t quite working as well as I wanted.

In addition to this, the pupils were also involved in evaluating and reflecting on each workshop immediately after it finished. I wasn’t part of these sessions, but you get the gist of them from the evaluation sheets each child completed:

Did you...

At the end of the day there was a final session where the pupils were again asked for their thoughts on the different activities they had taken part in, this time feeding back verbally in response to questions such as: did you think the activity was better suited to any particular year groups; what did you enjoy about the activity; and what aspect of learning did they think it was relevant to.

I followed my last group into their final session and so was able to get a feel for how positively it had been received. I missed whether they thought it was suited towards a particular age group, which was a shame because I want to know how the youngest children got on with it.

There was potentially a large focus on writing during the game, and I wanted to check whether the working in pairs (and often with a teacher supporting them), coupled with the verbal reporting-back sessions, meant that they were still able to express their ideas in a way that wasn’t too daunting (more important to me than actually generating written documentation).

A really interesting thing that came out during this evaluation was how much the pupils were linking it to their maths and science lessons. It’s possible it could also have been influenced by us working in the science room, but they were mostly making an incredibly strong connection to the containers of liquid and their work on capacity etc!

Another piece of feedback I received, this time from a member of staff at lunch time, was the value of the reporting-back sessions in going towards developing some much-needed speaking and listening skills. This was really useful, because up until then I had been a little bit concerned about the pacing and whether this bit slowed things down too much.

Anyway, many lessons learned, and I’m confident that the Emergent Game framework can be successfully and interestingly adapted to use in different education contexts. Next challenges might be to explore how it might be harnessed to a specific set of learning objectives. It would also be good to get the pupils roaming around the school a bit and interacting with their surroundings. I’d also like to see what happens if we re-introduce the emergent aspect and ask the pupils to start generating their own missions…

How to Wow: closing thoughts

6th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts

I seem to have already covered most of the stuff I was originally going to write about in this concluding post, so instead I’m just going to put down a few thoughts responding to this report by Agent Muhammad:

Security Level: 1
To: Agent A
From: Agent Muhammad
Message:
During the last 2 days I have learnt that being an Agent is hard but fun. We have completed the humming path. Then we tried to call Scats to our planet but he didn’t come. The next day Scats came to our planet. He said he was from Northsaxon. All of us thought he was fake. After we did some activities with Scats. First I went into 3BG cloakroom and worked out how shadows are big and small and how they have come to life. Then we tried to make the spiders work which Scats brought to our planet. They were solar power spiders so first I put a torch near the spider but it didn’t move. Then I put a big light and it did move. After we put transparent, translucent and opaque material near the spider

I love the way that “All of us thought he was fake.” is plonked in the middle there, but doesn’t affect how much he was absorbed into proceedings.

Other than a couple of children asking me if Skatz “was real”, I witnessed very little in the way of scepticism in the the story we were weaving. …but that’s not to say I think they believed it was all true.

I mentioned the use of slightly shonky, unrealistic-looking props in an earlier post. I think it’s important to signal that projects like these are something to play along with, that they’re not real. This offers protection from things that might otherwise be scary, but also opens up an ‘anything goes’ approach to responses that don’t necessarily have to be correct in order to be good.

I have these videos in mind when I say this (an earlier post):

The aim is to create a situation where the pupils are allowed to be wrong and where they are encouraged to frequently review their ideas and adapt them in response to new developments. Also where they are not afraid to be wrong and are therefore more free to suggest imaginative, innovative ideas. This is very much my interpretation of promoting creativity, especially within education, where I feel it is desperately needed.

In other contexts the term I use for it is “protovation” (I think the term originally came out of work done by the Institute for the Future identifying skills necessary for workplaces of the near future.) Read Catt Avery’s essay exploring protovation in relation to Art, Science, gardening, collaboration and the curation of ideas for a starter on why the protovation approach is relevant now.

In wow projects I like to set things up so that the characters and teachers don’t have a definitive right answer, so the children are free to follow their own trains of thought. I’m curious as to how this looks from the outside though.

In July, The Telegraph ran a story with the headline “Children traumatised by ‘War of Worlds’ abduction of teacher“, a story I first came across via this post. Compare and contrast with sources a little closer to the action: the Southway School post and the Mid Sussex Times article and video.

I don’t really feel I have enough facts to be able to comment on whether the children actually were traumatised, and if so, to what extent, but the articles serve to highlight something we talked about a lot with both the Pod in the Quad and the Song for Skatz projects: what will the parents think? What happens when excited kids go home and recount their tales of adventure?

For an immersive experience, one of the powerful techniques at our disposal is that of disruption: allowing the school day/week to start off as usual and then to disrupt it by suddenly steering it off into the project narrative. How do you balance this against forewarning parents and guardians that something unusual will be happening?

One possible solution is to wrap it up in the process of getting permissions for the all-important project documentation. Ideally, permissions need to be established near the start of the planning stages, so maybe this allows enough of a buffer zone between the paperwork going out and the project delivery starting? I’ve also wondered about the possibility of making the parents complicit in the project too, after all, why should the experience be confined to the school grounds and the school day?

My observation session right at the start of the project planning was done in character: I spent about an hour moving among the pupils during an IT session, introducing myself to them individually as someone doing an investigation and asking them a) if they’d seen anything unusual happen in school recently and b) what what the most unusual thing they could imagine happening in school? I left them with a request that if they did see anything unusual in the future, that they should let me know about it. What if some of the pupils had received a letter from me at their homes? Maybe something along the lines of “Thanks for saying you would help, we’ve found out that something is about to happen, please keep your eyes peeled and ask your teacher to phone us if you see something we should know about.”

I love the idea that the project could leak out of the usual school boundaries, and also that a call from a pupil could kick-start the main action, but how do you work with parents to steer the child’s response to the receipt of the letter? It would necessitate a lot more time (and therefore money), but I’d like to think the returns would be high!

I know this is the sort of technique I’d go for if I was designing a game, but maybe it’s different in education? Is it?

So, I suppose my closing thought is a question: where do we go from here?

6th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts

How to Wow: Day 4

5th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts

Thursday morning was spilt into 4 sessions, each about 30 minutes long. Our original plan was to stream the special agents into an upper and a lower ability group, but that didn’t happen in the end (I think mainly because it hadn’t happened the previous afternoon either) so we just kept to the two normal class groups.

The main aim for the day was to produce the song for Skatz to take back to Nednil with him, so the special agents worked to develop the light and shadow vocabulary further, and produced a dictionary of relevant “wow words”. The groups also collaborated to write a verse each and to compose an instrumental section for the song.

We also did some more work to reinforce the activities from the previous day.

Again, I was in a predominantly support role, but this was a much better situation compared to the previous day: Skatz was leading the musical side of things and the teachers were leading the vocabulary-based stuff. As it should be.

As well as being able to spend 1-on-1 time with any special agents who were struggling, I concentrated on documenting the activities. I generally try to give myself a character where it’s perfectly logical for them to always be carrying a camera and taking photos of what’s going on, and this project was no exception.

As well as my stills camera (which I also used to record the video) I also had a digital voice recorder. Things can get a bit side-tracked of you start using things like this to do ad hoc interviews etc during activities – everybody wants a go! – so what I did was to use a pair of binaural microphones (they look like earphones) and pretend that they were ear pieces and that I was listening out in case Agents A or E (Emma, the Creative partnerships agent) tried to contact me.

(Incidentally, I nearly got caught out a couple of times on the Monday, so from the Tuesday I carried a collection of spare batteries, mics and empty memory cards around with me in a camera bag clipped to my belt. I’d also been making quite a big deal of using my notepad to write down everything that we did and found out. This went in the kit bag too, as well as a spare pen!)

Here is a sample of audio taken from first thing in the morning using the binaural mics. (They were looking at their messages to Agent A again.) There’s a lot of background noise and echo, but they do well considering we’re talking in quite hushed voices. Another thing to bear in mind is that audio’s a useful tool because it frees you up from some of the issues of publishing childrens’ photos when it comes to publicising a project.

The downside of all these photos (about 450 on my camera over the 4 days) and all the ambient recording, is the sheer quantity of material produced. It could be a great way for teachers to monitor understanding etc, but realistically I think I’m the only one who trawls through it after the project has finished. Question: is there any merit in making going through the documentation an integral part of the project?

(Just as a guide, it will generally take me at least a day (usually unpaid) to put together something half-way-decent as an overview of what the project was about. How much longer would it take to include evaluation of what’s been documented and does that add enough value to warrant the time spent on it?)

As well as the general as-it-happens documentation, we also had the very specific need to document the song that was the main outcome of the project. This was quite nerve-wracking because, although Skatz had bought a voice recorder too, it was playing up and we couldn’t get it to work. That put the burden of responsibility onto mine and the set-up of the afternoon was that it was a one-shot-only chance to get it recorded correctly. A bit daunting, to say the least, but it worked and I was able to convert it and email a link to the teachers overnight so that they could play it in assembly the next morning.

The afternoon was orientated around Skatz’s farewell. The special agents spent some time rehearsing the song they had written and also a sheet of wow words for Skatz to take home with him. The way the sessions worked out led to an interesting situation where one of the teachers who was not confident with teaching music had to lead her class in rehearsing their instrumental section whilst Skatz was working with the other group. She was quite daunted by the prospect, but had seen Skatz working with her class previously and so was able to use the same techniques that he had used. I don’t now how this has affected her confidence long-term, but this sort of thing is a really simple, basic illustration of good stuff that can come out of these types of projects where teaching is split between visiting professionals and the teachers.

Then it was time for the grand finale…

The original plan (have I used that phrase quite a lot?) was to go back out onto the playground and do another big humming path to open up the inter-dimensional tear that Skatz travelled through, but this idea got rained off. Instead, we gathered in the hall and shut the doors and drew the curtains as before.

There was a round of thank-yous and goodbyes and presentations and then we sang the finished song:

Bring us words to wake up the light,
We can’t go on living in the night.
We need knowledge of the shadows and the sun,
Without help, our world is done.
Help us make and sing our song,
To bring us light and right the wrong.
One last thing we have to tell,
Only wow words break the spell, only wow words break the spell.

Bring us words to wake up the light,
We can’t go on living in the night.
We need knowledge of the shadows and the sun,
Without help, our world is done.
Help us make and sing our song,
To bring us light and right the wrong.
One last thing we have to tell,
Only wow words break the spell, only wow words break the spell.

After the song, we had to somehow dispose of Skatz: something we’d wrestled with all through the project. We felt it was important to have the illusion of him being transported back to his dimension, rather than just going out through the school gate and walking down the road. After allowing the special agents to play freely for a few minutes with the mystery objects/glow sticks from their investigation packs, we gathered them into 2 lines and got them to wear their blindfolds whilst Skatz performed a ceremony that involved him walking up and down the rows beating out a rhythm on a cymbal.

During this process Skatz secretly passed the cymbal to me and crept out of the hall (us having carefully padded the frame at lunch time so it wouldn’t make any noise). Once Skatz was out of the building I dropped the cymbal and we turned the lights on as everybody took their blindfolds off.

The special agents, on discovering Skatz was no longer in the room, all immediately rushed over to the storeroom in the corner where a load of furniture and sports equipment was kept. They were utterly convinced he was in there, despite me having seen that at least half of them were peeking out from underneath their blindfolds as I walked around. Interestingly, not one single child spoke up to say that it had been me on the cymbal. We did a bit of “what happened?” and “where do you think he’s gone?” hunting around and entertaining theories, before gathering everyone together to wrap up.

It was at this point that I realised we had serious misjudged this part of the project.

We had been so intent on making sure the effect was convincing, that we had almost completely omitted to take into consideration the affect it would have on the emotions of the children we were working with. They were all really sad and subdued and it took a lot of work from myself and the teachers to put a positive spin on it and to bring the energy levels back up. Some weeks later when the CP agent went back to the school to get feedback from the pupils, the overwhelming first reaction was that they were hurt that Skatz had left without saying goodbye.

The reality was that we did quite a lot of the goodbye and thank you stuff, it’s just that Skatz had used a little I’ll-sing-you-another-song-after-this-thing-with-the-cymbal sleight of hand to try and discourage peeking and that by far outweighed all the other stuff.

How to wrap up the delivery part of the next project I work on is something I will need to give a lot more thought to. In the Pod in the Quad project, a goodbye was used as a prompt for a golden time session with Paul Conneally discussing themes of saying goodbye, and I think we should probably have included an aspect of this in the Song for Skatz project.

I got lots of hugs from the special agents as they left the room, and then I sorted out some of the remaining equipment, wrote a thank-you-and-I-got-back-safely-and-all-the-lights-came-back letter from Skatz and then that was it. Skatz had gone straight to a gig in Bristol and the teachers were busy with meetings etc. I think I needed a different goodbye too!

I think I’ll leave the issue of evaluation and feedback for the next post…

What we learned

• We spent a lot of time correcting the pupils from saying “small” shadows for when objects were far away from the light source before we realised that they were just trying to express the concept of faint.
• Artists leading activities is good, teachers leading activities is good; teachers being able to observe how artists lead activities can be very good.
• Have a range of methods of documenting – both in terms of media and in terms of ambient vs interview styles.
• When glow sticks are bent too much and crack open they don’t half make a mess and it is human nature to peek out of the gap at the bottom of a blindfold!
• Please do consider relaxing the tightness of the narrative in exchange for a more gentle/discussed goodbye.

5th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts

How to Wow: Day 3

4th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts

This was our riskiest day, both in terms of having to get various logistics right and also in terms of not knowing how the special agents would react.

I started the day by saying I didn’t know what else we were supposed to do next and maybe it would be good if the special agents could write a report to Agent A (my boss) explaining what they had done so far and what they thought we should do next.

It’s always good to have little snapshots of how people are interpreting what’s going on, but this was basically a distraction to allow Skatz to get into position at the far end of the playing field that both classrooms look out onto. At the pre-arranged time the blinds went up and a message came over from the other classroom that there was a stranger outside.

A Song for Skatz: a stranger arrives from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

I love that this was our massive “look kid! Skatz has arrived” moment and the over-riding priority for some of them is still to show me something they’ve written that they’re proud of!

Other things that happened in the video:
at 0:51 some of the special agents have realised they can get a better view of what’s going on if their teacher lets them go in through the other door.
at 1:03 you can catch a glimpse of Agent P, one of the special agents who always liked a bit of extra responsibility, returning from his mini-mission of being sent to find the headmaster and tell him what was going on.
at 1:30 we have the headmaster’s pronouncement that the stranger looks friendly, so we know everything’s going to be OK!
1:52 Skatz and I had worked out as part of the back-story that because he came from a place that had been dark for a very long time, the practical way of greeting people was to touch them on the head.

After Skatz had greeted everybody, been fetched something to drink, been offered somewhere to sit down and had done some comedy “what’s this do?” clomping around with the printer and interactive whiteboard stuff, he settled down to describe his journey and explain about what life was like on his planet. [I had to obscure some of the faces on this video - hence the blurriness.]

A song for Skatz: Skatz introduces himself from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

As I mentioned before, we’d used the project wiki to build up a fairly comprehensive list of details concerning Skatz’s background, what life was like for him and how/why he had travelled to the school. Watch that video again and be impressed at how the whole thing doesn’t get de-railed by Agent Alex asking Skatz how come he has a watch. (Full credit to Skatz for that!)

Watch again and note how at that point the conversation changes from being information being delivered by Skatz to being information being imparted by the special agents. It was beautifully surreal when they spontaneously started chanting out the months of the year and days of the week. Priceless.

We told Skatz about the song that had come through in the message and we asked if he could sing us the bit that had got garbled at the end. This is when we found out that the reason Skatz had come to the school was because they minstrels on his planet had forgotten the end of the song. They use to sing a song that had all the information about light and shadows in it and they would sing it every morning. When they stopped, that’s when the sunlight disappeared. Skatz needed our help to re-write the song so he could take the knowledge back to his planet.

Skatz told us he’d only got 2 sleeps’ worth of time before the inter-dimensional tear opened up again and he had to go back to his planet…

After the special agents had had the initial 20-30 minutes talking to Skatz we split up into 4 groups again and rotated around 4 different activities. We only had a couple of hours in which to get some practical experience of the learning objectives before we then focused on developing the vocabulary associated with them.

Here’s a quick outline of the 4 activities and the learning objectives associated with them. Int he planning sages these had been grouped together around themes and a general approach and then the exact nature of the activity put together once Skatz had joined the team and the overall narrative had been formed.

Feed the Spiders

• Recognise that light comes from a variety of sources
• Shadows are formed when the light is blocked
• Compare shadows
• Use knowledge of materials to predict shadows
• Opaque objects do not let light through; transparent objects let a lot of light through

Skatz had bought 2 spiders with him, but they had been asleep ever since the light diappeared. The special agents had to find out what made them wake up (they were solar-powered, needing a very strong light source). After waking them up, the special agents had to investigate what affect leaves made from different materials (opaque, transparent, semi-transparent) had on them.

What shape are shadows?

• Shadows are formed when the light is blocked
• Shadows are similar in shape to the objects forming them
• Compare shadows from different objects
• Use knowledge of materials to predict shadows

So he wouldn’t get scared when they suddenly appeared again when the light came back, the special agents needed to be able to explain to Skatz about how shadows are made and why they sometimes look scary.

We took lamps into one of the cloakrooms and made outlines of everyday objects. By moving the cut-outs closer and further away to the lamps we made the shadows get bigger and more faint and smaller and more dark. When we turned the cut-outs at an angle they made distorted, scary shapes we could use to tell stories.

Can we tell the time with shadows?

• Shadows can be used to tell the approximate time of day
• The sun is the main source of daylight
• The sun appears highest in the sky at midday
• The sun appears to move/the apparent movement of the sun is caused by the earth rotating on its axis
• When the sun is behind, the shadow is in front
• Describe a fair test
• Measure length
• Compare shadows

Apart from needing to know when two sleeps’ time is up, if Skatz is the only person in his world with a watch, he will have to teach the other people how to tell the time using shadows.

The special agents used the torches from their investigation packs to model the movement of the sun around an object and work out the relationship between the position of the sun and the position and length of the shadow.

Skatz

The fourth activity was spending time with Skatz to find out more about his life and his job as a minstrel. The special agents were encouraged to ask questions and make use of the notepads from their investigation packs.

How do we turn this knowledge into a song?

The afternoon was split into two sessions with each class spending half their time on collating and understanding vocabulary related to the morning’s activities and the other half of their time working with Skatz to understand how songs are built.

What we learned

• The write-a-message-to-Agent-A-and-please-don’t-look-out-of-the-window exercise highlighted some interesting contrasts in expectations in how polished written work – any written work – should be. (cf drawing and mark-making.)
• Don’t assume any particular type of reaction to a situation.
• Things get interesting if you put the pupils in the position of being the expert.
• They will notice even the tiniest of details. Example: the battery inside Skatz’s guitar. Be prepared to improvise!
• Given the chance, I would organise the morning activities differently:
  1. I think most of the staff involved only saw the notes I prepared on the morning in question. As a result, they were not very confident with the material. This was compounded by them also having requested that the staff travel around the activities with the same group all the time, therefore having to deliver 4 activities from scratch rather than repeating just one and being able to develop it.
  2. That we were solely relying on the notes I had written the week before to communicate what people had to do was a problem – this is why we ideally needed some sort of final training session with all the staff together.
  3. The lack of confidence of the staff in delivering the activities meant that I had to take on a floating role (moving from activity to activity checking that everything was ok) rather than playing a more active role in delivering. Not good.
  4. An alternative to this would have been to have brought in another person to co-deliver, but we didn’t have the budget for this either.
  5. After the day’s delivery, feedback from the teachers was that they wanted more time spent on the activities. This again relates to the points above and things not being slick enough to have really used the allotted time effectively, but also prompts the question of why this had not been broached during the planning stages – again, the importance of having open channels of communication such that everyone involved participates in the planning and things like this can be caught ahead of time.
• For some of the activities we’d planned on doing them outside (especially the telling the time with shadows one). The weather was rainy though so we couldn’t. A lot of what we did had to be double-planned for different weather conditions.
• If the staff do feel they need to revisit the practical side of the activities, I’m curious to know if they will use the same activities (solar-powered spiders in drain pipes etc – they still have all the equipment) or whether they will revert to whatever they would have used previously…
• Within a limited amount of time, how do you balance expectations of covering the curriculum vs all the other stuff (narrative etc) that turns the project into a wow project?
• Re telling the time with shadows: We discovered that text books typically illustrate this with diagrams that start with the sun rising on the left hand side and coming down on the right, presumably as a result of us reading in a left-to-right direction. In this topic though, teachers also have to talk about the sun rising in the East and we conventionally depict this as being on the right-hand arm of a compass cross. Confusing.
• Anagrams and reversals are a fun way of naming distant planets and far off lands. Skatz came from a town called Nednil; the special agents studied at Linden.

4th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts