Circuit-bent furby makes an appearance
Small-child-and-circuit-bent-furby win. from nikkipugh on Vimeo.
See, it’s all about the performance for one.
Small-child-and-circuit-bent-furby win. from nikkipugh on Vimeo.
See, it’s all about the performance for one.
Since I started this circuit-bent Furby project, people have been nudging me to do some sort of a performance with it.
I struggle with this idea, I think for two main reasons.
The first is that I’ve never been to a performance that even remotely indicates to me what a circuit-bent Furby gig might be like. What might a circuit-bent Furby gig be like?
The second is that, as Danny started to get close to with his questioning of how I relate to the Furby as I’m messing with its circuits, the interesting thing about this kind of object for me is how people interact with it.
Fiona asked me to bring the Furby along to her recent birthday party. Brilliant! A chance to see how other people play with it!
It was great to just sit back and watch as different people responded to the thing in different ways. Also good was how people responded when the Furby failed to respond …and the different ways in which frustration, anger and dominance were expressed! This is the stage where I start to find out what it is that I have made. Up until then, it’s just been a learning project as I try and improve my electronics skills. It starts to come alive only once I put it into the hands of other people.
So, the idea of a performance and therefore of an audience is quite an alien one for me. I’m more interested in participants; in audiences of one.
Here’s Pete figuring out Furby-Thingamagoop interaction:
Performance for Furby and Thingamagoop from nikkipugh on Vimeo.
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
A few weeks ago, one @kitlarks (who I don’t know) appeared on Twitter, apparently having been blackmailed to sign up in order to receive a huffing duck from, I believe, @EmmaGx (who I don’t know either).
I don’t really know what the deal was, but it appeared to involve signing up, a certain number of posts and an uploaded avatar in exchange for a drawing of a huffing duck. This seemed to me to not be a Twitter-like way of approaching things.
Anyway, one thing led to another (not exactly crowd-sourcing, I know, but an interesting exercise nonetheless) and a collaborative huffing duck was incrementally produced in a vaguely exquisite corpse-esque manner. Ok, not exactly exquisite corpse either…
You can see the animations of the cumulative contributions here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
As you can see, the internet badgers ate the huffing duck during the process of adding the head at stage 8. Unfortunate, but if you look carefully there’s a nice after-image huffing duck in glorious Technicolor burned onto your retina, and that’s perhaps as it should be.
I’m not sure what happens to the huffing duck next: whether it fades to white, or whether it will be resurrected to continue its evolution. In the meantime however, this post is by way of setting aside a small slice of cyberspace to say that a huffing duck happened and it happened because of these people (alphabetical order):
@alexhughes, @benjibrum, @graphiquillan, @haling, @lauraehall, @mookstudios, @soba_girl.
A very big thank you to all involved!
Since doing an exchange visit there in 2005, my contact with Joshibi University of Art and Design and its students has included: helping to host their exchange students coming to Birmingham; effectively working there as a technician for a month; countless days just sort of hanging out there; keeping in contact with several pupils and alumni, including visiting their homes and having them stay with me in the UK; and hearing from alumni friends their tales of working as artists post-graduation and their encounters with graduates from other universities. As a result, I have a pretty well-formed idea of some of the things I would like to do to shake things up a bit, beyond my low-level “So, have you ever considered showing your work, outside of a gallery context” vibrations.
In 2006, 2007 and 2008 I also coordinated and delivered the social programme as part of the annual Joshibi Summer School. This involved sorting out all the pastoral and evening/weekend social stuff for the 30-or-so students who would spend a month based at Bournville Centre for the Visual Arts (BCVA).
We’ve had many conversations about how the Summer School programme could be improved. The main problems from my point of view are that the students arrive as a group; take over a block in a halls of residence as a group; are the only group studying at Bournville over the summer; have an interpreter with them the whole time; and have negligible contact with anyone outside of the staff and the other Summer School students. They may get to experience something of a different way of approaching art education, but there’s a lot missing in terms of cultural exchange and development of language skills.
I decided I didn’t want to work on the social programme this year, but was later invited to provide a day’s teaching for the Summer School. Based on last year’s werewolf success, and my recent work with BARG, there was no doubt that a game would be involved.
My contribution was to form a starting point for a larger project where the students would go on to develop work that contrasts London and Tokyo. I ran two workshops in the morning where we compared the places in Japan they recommended I visited to the places that actually had meaning to them in their day-to-day lives. This got us from guidebook staples such as the Emperor’s Palace and Kiyomizu-dera to stories of favourite ice-cream shops, overheard sounds of children playing in campsites and stars as seen above car parks.
We also looked at the landmarks that we give significance to in our journeys through landscapes that we are very familiar with. Taking our journeys to university as an example, we drew maps and uncovered more stories. I’m familiar enough with the bus ride to the Joshibi Sagamihara campus that I could recount my personal map of that journey and compare it to theirs. This experience lasting only a few seconds is so completely and vividly on my map that I’m genuinely shocked to realise now that it’s a memory from 4 years ago.
As expected, the smell of the chicken farms featured prominently in the cycled versions of the journey…
For the afternoon, I’d prepared a scavenger hunt around Bournville Green and the surrounding area.
This was designed as a team game, but with significant components where each student would be very much working alone (…unless they plucked up the courage to ask passers by for assistance!). Use of the Japanese language was, of course, banned throughout.
The students randomly selected a question to tackle and then had some time to discuss it with their team mates. The questions were worded to avoid typical Japanese constructions of English. I also tried to avoid making them so simple that no discussion was needed to fully understand them.
Examples include.
There were a range of strategies employed in designing the questions. Some of them, such as the sheep’s name question above, could only be answered if the student asked the appropriate question of the relevant shop keeper. Others would be made infinitely easier if they asked a member of the public for help in explaining what a particular word refers to (e.g. dragon’s teeth).
The other major aim was to get the students out and into parts of Bournville that they would never normally go to. This had the intended bonus of meaning that I had to seek out these places first. I was a student at BCVA for 5 years, and yet there were so many places in that tiny area that I had never been to until the planning stages of this game. I had lots of adventures and conversations: so much of Bournville is hidden away in a secret second-layer-back, and there are some truly class acts working there.
I was also determined that I would work with what was already in situ, and not parachute in any foreign bodies to plant for the game. The sharks, Iggle Piggles and Bill Oddies were all there already, waiting to be discovered and played with.
Right, so we had the basic mechanism of having to go to places and find answers to questions. The other aspect of the game design was about how to make this an intense, sometimes visceral experience.
Prior to explaining the game rules, we’d confiscated (in a nice way!) all their mobile phones, electronic dictionaries and phrasebooks. This was originally done to ensure that looking things up didn’t replace discussion, but I think it also had quite a wrenching effect, because this technology is usually very heavily relied upon.
I deliberately made it so that, after the initial discussion phase, each player then had to go off independently to find the answer. This took away another safety net of group decision making.
The other thing to do was to add a magic vest in the form of some hats for the players to wear whist they were out and about.
This covered my usual criterion for having an element of silliness involved in order to break down a few barriers, but as Holly Gramazio pointed out at Hide and Speak, your players look like criminals and, if the students were going to be in the bank counting CCTV cameras, I wanted it to be clear that they probably weren’t dangerous! The “help me find stuff” labels on the hats were intended as an invitation for people not involved in the game to approach the students and initiate conversations.
The weather was drizzly, the students were extremely tired after spending a long weekend in London (not to mention the jet lag!), energy levels were low, and I had to tweak some stuff on the fly to increase the pacing, but it all worked! It worked a treat!
It was great to see the balloons bobbing around on the green and in front of the parade of shops. It was fun to see the teams playing jan-ken-pon to decide the next runner, but substituting diddle-diddle-dum lyrics so as to avoid the 50 point fine for speaking Japanese. It was satisfying to hear small groups of students with nothing to do standing around and chatting in English. It was worrying to hear that one girl hadn’t been seen for 25 minutes, but heart-warming to hear from the search party that she’d been found in the park with a gang of kids around her trying to help her solve her clue. We giggled to hear the story of people offering to help count dragon’s teeth. It did nothing less than warm my cockles to hear someone describe the hats as being magic, a comfort, and to thank me for making them wear them.
All three teams did really well and the rain mostly stayed away until we had finished playing. The final scores were in the region of 120 points (average 10 points per question) with only maybe 4 failed questions per team.
I finished off the day with a more formal presentation about the use of mechanisms and rule sets to instigate interactions with spaces; how presenting something as a game contrasts with presenting it as a piece of performance artwork; the importance of stories; the importance of magic vests/hats; the importance of silliness (and how it’s easier to be part of a large group doing silly things rather than being by yourself doing silly things) and how doing projects in public spaces confers ownership of that space to you (in the sense of responsibility and empathy, rather than of power).
Anyway, it looks like I may yet end up doing some social stuff with the group on Saturday: I may take the opportunity to quiz them on how the game has affected their perception of Bournville…
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:
[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/WOW.mp3]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.
Feed the spiders, feed the spiders,
Find out what they need to wake.
They need light, a powerful light:
Energy to help defeat the night.
Feed the spiders, feed the spiders,
Find out more for us to take.
Our experiments show transparent,
Not translucent is what’s right.
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.
[dark instrumental]
In the morning, when the sun rise,
Long dark shadows casts to the West.
Then at Midday sun is highest,
Shadows short beneath our feet.
In the evening when the sun sets,
Long dark shadows spread to the East.
Measuring the shadows’ length,
Tells us when to wake and sleep.
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.
[light instrumental]
Opaque objects block the light,
Forming shadows dark as night
When the object is translucent,
That’s when shadows start to fade.
When the object is transparent,
It forms a shadow light and bright.
Twisting turning round the object,
Means a stretched out shadow’s made.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
3rd 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
Day 2 was when the project delivery really got going. First thing in the morning I called another emergency meeting in the hall (curtain drawn and doors shut so we could talk in private). We discussed the results from using The Anticipator the previous day and what we thought it meant. Then things got serious…
I’d received another message from my boss. It looked like this was going to be a massive mission and I wasn’t sure I could do it by myself. I wanted to ask the pupils for help, but the new message was not just Top Secret but Super Top Secret – which meant only special agents were allowed to read it. As it happens, the pupils all wanted to become special agents, so we did a bit of training to make sure they were healthy, could do sums and could follow instructions (skills they identified as being necessary for the job) and then issued everyone with an investigation pack.
Each pack contained:
Now I could read them the message: scientists had discovered that there were planets in distant dimensions that were suddenly going dark. My next instruction was to find out what would happen on Earth if the sunlight disappeared so we could be prepared in case it happened here.
We split the class into 4 groups and spent the remaining 10-15 minutes before break discussing the implications of living in a world with no light. The key themes we tried to steer the conversation around were:
At the end of the session I sent a pupil to the office to see if any more messages had arrived. There were, but we weren’t quite sure what to make of them: there were a few swirly diagrams and also some information about a travelling minstrel called Skatz who put information into his songs.
We had the beginning of one of his songs, but then the transmission must have got garbled or something because the rest of it was missing:
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 spellFeed the spiders, feed the spiders, find out what they need to wake
They need …
Feed the spiders, feed the spiders, find out more for us to take
They need …
It took me most of break time to carry the board with the map on it back to the investigation table in the corridor the other side of the playground. I got completely mobbed by swarms of special agents full of enthusiastic questions and ideas! (most frequently heard question: “Can we keep what’s in our boxes?”!)
After break the special agents worked on some activities that the teachers had devised. We figured out that the black cloths could be used as blindfolds and we tried to do some everyday activities – like going to get our coats – whilst we couldn’t see. We also went outside and and tried to make some of our other senses work harder.
A Song for Skatz: What would it be like if the light disappeared here too? from nikkipugh on Vimeo.
When we returned inside we found out that I’d received more messages. Skatz needed to come to the school and we had to send the message to call him over from wherever he was! The messages said we were to use a ‘humming path’, so we looked again at the swirly diagrams and realised that’s what they were for.
The humming paths were actually the Lost Sport labyrinths lifted from the Find the Lost Ring ARG – thanks to Jane for permission to use them! In the planning meetings we’d been talking about getting the pupils to do stuff blindfolded and then we jumped to talking about needing to do some sort of ceremony to call the hero over from his world. Bing! It was great to be able to say “well actually, that already exists!”. The experience of completing the labyrinths as a team and trying to improve your times also meshed really well with some of the personal skills we wanted to develop in the children too.
It probably took about 30-45 minutes during lunchtime and registration for me to chalk out 4 small labyrinths around the centre of the Anticipator activity levels we had mapped the previous day. Then, after registration, we all gathered on the playground to work out what to do with them.
We knew that Skatz was a type of musician, so we used the funnel shape of the humming path to beam the sound of us humming out to him and lead him to the right place. We used our new blindfold skills too.
I’d not had a chance to properly go through what we were aiming for with all 4 members of staff, so really they didn’t have that much more information than the special agents. It was really interesting to go around the 4 groups and see the different interpretations on how the humming paths should work. My first responses tended towards “no, you don’t do it like that; do it like this” but I eventually realised that this wasn’t the Lost Sport, this was something different, and so it was ok for it to be, well, different. The important thing was that each group made significant progress with whatever style they had devised, and we actually started getting some comparably fast times emerging out of what was initially quite shambolic. (Let’s just say Team Wellington are not under any immediate threat!) :)
Interestingly these fast times pretty much vanished when we gathered all of the groups together onto one humming path to do a 4-runs-back-to-back-special-amplified-broadcast to Skatz. I wonder if that was just the shift in location, or the sudden appearance of an audience?
The original plan was to spend time with the 4 small groups getting the basic technique right on small labyrinths and then to gather everyone together on a central medium-sized one for the grand finale ceremonious one to send the message across the dimensions. It became obvious that this was too ambitious, so we improvised by letting the special agents spend time decorating their group’s humming path with welcome messages and pictures of things related to light.
That brought us to the end of the school day. There was lots of speculation on how long it would take for our message to reach Skatz and then how long it would take Skatz to travel to us: 5 minutes? 2 weeks? A year?
Several of the special agents said they would keep humming at home that night to try and make it happen quicker.
3rd 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
2nd 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 the rabbit hole to the project: an introductory day to set the narrative off, rather than one to tick of learning objectives. The day began as normal, except Agent N (me) could periodically be seen walking around with a camera and looking a bit concerned…
We used the first hour of the day for me to set up an investigation table in the corridor between the two Y3 classrooms I’d be working with and for the two class teachers to do some exercises with the pupils to find out what they already knew about light and shadow (so we could have a marker for how effective the project had been). Towards the end of the first period I called an emergency meeting in the hall where I introduced myself as Agent N and explained that I was a secret agent that had been sent to do some important research at the school.
I asked the pupils if they had seen anything unusual, and whether they had any idea what was going on. The main aims of this session were to:
We gave the pupils very little information other than a very superficial back-story to who I was and establishing that I would be working with them throughout the course of the day in small groups to use a particular piece of equipment to scan the school grounds for signs of impending Very Exciting Things.
I spent the rest of the day working with the pupils in groups of 5, for about 15 minutes per group whilst the rest of the pupils continued with their normal lessons. I’d designed an activity that required the children to work together as a team – each with specific responsibilities – to do a very specific task (go to 5 locations marked on the map and count how many LEDs were lit up on The Anticipator. Working with them in small groups allowed me to listen to each child’s thoughts on what was happening and to deal with any concerns they might have (I think only one actually expressed any concern over what might be about to happen).
The teamwork was exemplary, no really, it was, and they were very absorbed by the story: it was excellent to see them noticing the tiniest details around them and accommodating them into the narratives they started constructing. My job was mainly to ask open-ended prompt questions.
A Song for Skatz: using The Anticipator from nikkipugh on Vimeo.
So, there we have the first examples of the malleability that I mentioned in the previous post: I’d deliberately set Agent N up as a person who didn’t have all the answers …which meant she couldn’t tell people they were wrong. Which meant each child could potentially be right. There was space to accommodate 60 different versions of what was happening.
Speculative ideas were discussed, analysed and then commented on how probable the pupils thought they were.
The Anticipator was designed to elicit an inspirational response. It functioned, but didn’t look like it should. Most of the children started off with comments like “That’s not real”, or “It’s made from cardboard, it can’t work …can it?”. 10 minutes later I was being told things like “My Dad’s got one of them” and “Yeah, they’re really expensive, thay cost £400!”. Using shonky props (cf ones that strive to look realistic) is a great way to signal that this is imaginative play.
At the end of the emergency meeting in the morning, I indicated to the children that I’d set up an investigation table and on it there was a map and some post it notes. I told them that since I was going to be very busy investigating outside all day that if they wanted to leave anything for me they should put it on the table. I also asked them to write down anything they thought might be important and stick it on the map for me.
The photo above was taken at lunch time – table and map already covered with thoughts about what I might have been sent to investigate, things spotted in the playground that might be important and a pile of clues.
This table was to be a hive of activity throughout the rest of the project – and that was with me doing not a lot more than pin up some of the messages that came though from my superiors. There were always clusters of children around it at break and lunch times, adding objects and words. Often I’d be called over to listen to them describing what they had found and what they thought it signified.
Shortly after taking the above photo, I was beckoned into the nearby staff room where an astonished teacher told me that the boy working away in his free time to add research to the investigation table was someone it was usually very difficult to engage…
On Day 2 we really turned up the intensity.
2nd 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
1st 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
Over the last year or two I’ve worked on several projects in schools. Two of these were “wow!” projects. I love wow projects – they have the potential to be everything I’m passionate about regarding learning and developing. They’re difficult to get right though, and even more difficult to pitch to schools without being able to point at precedents. I learned a huge amount from the first wow project I worked on (Pod in the Quad, lead artist Anne-Marie Culhane), and I built directly and extensively onto that experience when I delivered the second project.
That I’ve not come across projects like this outside of Creative Partnerships in Leicester (now part of The Mighty Creatives?) leads me to suspect (I hope I’m wrong) that this type of project is still quite rare.
Because I so strongly believe in the merits of this type of project and I want to be able to get better at designing them, (and I want more opportunities to work on them too) I’m going to publish a series of posts outlining how I approached the more recent of the two projects I worked on.
The intention of these posts is not to say “this is how it should be done”, but rather to say “this is what we tried; this is what we learned from it; what should we change next time around?”. Writing things down forces me to analyse them more thoroughly and through publishing the documentation it opens up the possibility of dialogue, constructive criticism and, hopefully, allows others to initiate their own projects with the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes – and triumphs – of others.
Wow projects are great – but there’s still plenty of room to make them better. There’s a little invisible question mark at the end of the “how to wow” title…
Who knows?! “Wow project” is a term that’s evolved out of the groups of people I’ve been working with. I’m not sure where it originated from and I think we’re probably still in the process of finding out what it can mean. Here are a few adjectives that I think are key:
Here’s a link to the initial project brief I received for the project I’ll be outlining in this series: WOW! A Song for Skatz.
In my application, and with reference to the previous “Pod in the Quad” project, I declared an intended agenda that focused on inspiration and malleability:
In particular I’d be looking for strategies that leave enough unknowns that a) there is space for the details to come alive in each child’s imagination, thus making the experience very vivid and b) there are no ‘wrong’ answers.
We will revisit these ideas, and look at how we used unknowns and spaces, later in the series.
I was lead artist on the project and therefore responsible for the artistic side of the project management. The Creative Partnerships (CP) representative (Creative Agent) managed the budgeting and a lot of the liaison with the school in general.
There was a half-day meeting between myself, the main teacher contact, the school’s CP link person and the Creative Agent. We explored lots of ideas and got a better idea of what was wanted from the project. I think we left that meeting with no particularly fixed ideas of what the project would be like, but understandings of who people were, what might be involved in a wow project, and, importantly, having found out that the main teacher I’d be working with had loads of ideas and enthusiasm of her own but had never had the opportunity to put them into use on a creative project at the school. As she gave me a tour of the school, I remember telling her that in my ideal world my job would be to be a back-seat driver, steering the school staff to design and deliver their own project.
I really dislike the idea that artists might be expected to come into schools, deliver a project independently of the school staff and independently of that particular school’s context, finish the project and then disappear off again as life at the school goes back to being exactly the way it was. (It was far from happening in this case, but I have experienced it elsewhere.) I much prefer a collaborative style of working and conversation is a critical part of that.
It can be tricky to manage effective conversation in school projects when there are very limited budgets and therefore timescales. It’s the channels of communication that are open outside of the planning meetings that can make really raise the project’s level up a few notches – wow project or otherwise.
With school projects where there are, as a minimum, 3 distinct parties that need to keep in touch, email and phone can sometimes get unwieldy. For this project I set up a free wiki so that everyone could easily find the most recent version of timetables and lesson plans etc, whilst also being able to edit them.
There were some promising responses when I first introduced it, but in this case it turned out to only be myself and the other creative practitioner that really used it to any great extent. It was invaluable for quickly mapping out Skatz’s backstory and brainstorming questions the pupils might ask and that we needed to have answers for. Had the circumstances worked out, I think it would also have been very useful for discussing and getting feedback on the proposed timetables I was producing for the delivery days too.
Use of a wiki to centralise the planning is definitely something I’d try again (so long as the others involved were reasonably happy with online things), but I think I might also try and provide a training session by way of an introduction and demonstration on how it works. Training sessions rely on having everyone present at the same time though, and this is not always possible in school contexts.
For this project we worked very closely with one of the two class teachers, but had minimal contact with the other whose class would also be involved in the project and no contact with either of the teaching assistants until the project began. I feel this was a mistake and I would recommend to include all staff in the planning stages to some extent. Even if they are not actively involved in the decision-making, wow projects are a lot about ownership and that goes for the staff as well as the pupils. Wow projects are also pretty bewildering things to have thrown at you if you don’t know what’s coming.
We had enough budget for 3 planning days with the school and another 2 for me working at home. I think the project needed another day with the school, which I would have used to make sure all the staff were trained up and confident with the activities they had to deliver (more to come on that later). I estimate I also spent at least 5 days planning the project and gathering/preparing props.
How do schools feel if more of the project budget is spent on planning compared to delivery? I’m used to things being that way around, but what are the expectations of the teachers?
Wow projects are lessons and theatre and improvisation all rolled into one. Each aspect must be planned in relation to learning objectives, contingencies, wet weather alternatives and curve balls the pupils might throw at it. They need a lot of planning.
Balance this with the need for open-ended conversation: a lot of the content for the project (1 day partial, 3 days full delivery) did not come together until the 3rd planning meeting, and then it changed significantly after Skatz came onboard and sessions were tweaked to make best use of his skills. This is also the point where it became apparent what narrative was best to hang everything together on.
(from the point the lead artist comes onboard, through to beginning delivery)
→ introductions and scope
→ tour of school
→ class observation (remember to do this in the style of the character you will play during the project – I took a notebook with me and asked pupils if they’d seen anything strange in school recently…)
→ developing ideas
→ refining content
→ identify other creative practitioners
→ recruit other creative practitioners
→ further adjust and develop ideas in response to (and in partnership with) the new team
→ train and thoroughly prepare the team
All this may take longer than expected and you may have to be flexible with your planned dates for delivery. Better to postpone a project like this and get it right, than to hurry it and not do all that planning justice.
The next 4 posts in this series will look at each of the delivery days in turn and then I shall finish off with one more about what happens after the delivery.
1st 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
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