How to Wow: Day 2

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:

  • a notepad
  • a pen (don’t buy cheap ones that don’t work)
  • a pencil (do buy ones that are pre-sharpened)
  • a strip of black cloth
  • a small torch (battery inserted, spare batteries on standby in the staff room)
  • an unidentified object (maybe it would come in useful later)
  • a name badge (a sticky label – unfortunately it would take a few weeks to get ones with a photo and barcode like mine printed up for them. We’d sort them out if the investigation went on for a long time…)

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.

discussion time

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:

  • the sun is our main source of light
  • examples of other sources of light
  • what we use light for
  • plants need light and we need plants for food

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 spell

Feed 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.

humming path questions

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.

drawing a humming path

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.

humming path

humming path

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.

Things we learned:

  • It’s surprisingly easy to stand in front of 60 people and make-believe about distant planets with strange things happening on them.
  • It’s surprisingly easy to make 60 people make-believe with you: during the whole project there were very few challenges from the pupils about whether things were real or not. Those that did come were sort of half-hearted. I don’t think that they thought it was genuine, but that they were very willing to suspend disbelief.
  • Giving each pupil an investigation pack is really powerful.
  • Giving each pupil a name badge was really powerful and really useful. The name badges were only sticky labels with their names written on them, but the pupils were wearing them with lots of pride. It also helped me reinforce their new responsibilities by being able to instantly refer to them by name. I underlined this by always referring to them as Agent [name]. As well as helping me know who was who on an individual level, it was an instant identifier for who was in the know and who wasn’t. This was a top secret mission and I had to handle queries coming from children outside the year group slightly differently to those who were part of the project.
  • Be aware of name badges when you are publishing documentation after the project.
  • Using the messages coming from my superiors worked absolutely brilliantly as a plot device. They were also a visual clue that something important was about to be revealed; they added an air of official business; and it it was useful in cutting down the amount of back-story we had to come up with – it gave a valid reason for me not to know the answer to some questions.
  • You really have got to be flexible and adapt your plans/expectations according to circumstances. Appreciate what is happening rather than worrying about what isn’t.
  • This improvisation can be unnerving if you’re not used to it!
  • Some of the adaptation comes from the teaching staff responding to what’s happening in the project and offering suggestions for activities. I would suggest these inputs be used and encouraged – don’t forget the overall aim is to do education differently. Giving staff space to try things out within the ‘safe’ environment of a Creative Partnerships style project (cf doing it on their own) is really important in my view. Obviously it would be best if this sort of input comes about during the planning stages, but sometimes maybe things don’t click until you actually start to experience what’s happening and how it fits together. This is not the place to be precious your ideas as an artist.
  • If you’re going to use the Lost Sport labyrinths in a project you need to practice constructing the markings and running them beforehand. Based on his experiences of using the labyrinths in his school, Tom had advised me to make the track widths larger, but based on young kids running with us at the practice BARG event I hadn’t thought this was necessary (also probably influenced by not wanting to measure out another rope!). I should have listened to Tom. It’s not that you have to make the tracks wider for the child running them, but that the children forming the walls will tend to stand right on the wall lines, rather than just behind with their toes up the the line like adults do. This makes the tracks very narrow, so widening the space between the chalk markings would compensate for this.
  • School secretaries are brilliant – they won’t just hold your primed messages in the office for you, but they’ll get you an envelope and write “Super Top Secret” on it too!

shadows

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