Brandon's blog

Welcome Back YES Teens!!!

This weekend myself and three teens (Desmond, Cambreana, and Marlow) are visiting the Science Museum of Minnesota and their Learning Places team. Our main focus this weekend has been documenting the history of the LP grant and how we can make our work transparent enough so other museums around the country can implement the same project within their community. 

For the teens, I think that they have made connections with other teens and gain a new appreciation for the work that they have all done in Learning Places. I am happy to see that are finally comfortable to show their glowing personalities to the staff of SMM, most of this weekend one teen in particular has been glued to my side. But I think finally has stepped out of their comfort zone and making new friends. The Mall of America was pretty cool, I wonder if I can eat out of every restaurant in the mall in one night? It will probably lead to the most terrifying GOBLIN ever. Speaking of GOBLIN, I did introduce him to the staff here, and I will say that it was a moving experience. 

That's all for now!!! 

On Saturday, the youth staff in Design It continued to explore with Pico Crickets. This week more than any other the youth seemed really engaged in the activities that we have planned. Our lesson for today was to "Invent New Kinds of Musical Instruments". The lesson was broken down into three challenges: Electric Banana, Pickel-Oh and Play-Doh Piano. To find out more information about these design challenges and how the lesson went please read the teens' blogs.
 
On the classroom management part of the class, we tried to implement something a little different this week. Normally, all the youth in a component take their break collectively, we wanted to see whether or not the youth would be responsible enough to manage their own break time. After each teen completed their three design challenges and a blog they were to take a fifteen minute break. We had a couple of teens that were running a little behind but for the most part everyone did a great job getting back on time. I think this is something that we will keep experimenting with.

Today in Design It, we made sketch robots. Sounds exciting huh? Well it sure was! We were given 1 AAA battery, a motor, markers, clothes pins, and popscicle sticks. Most of us were successful and we all got after a while

This Saturday in the wet lab the teens continued their group work. This weeks experiment was a flame test. Like most of the teens I was really excited about working with fire. Of course, we followed all of the lab safety procedures when handling the fire. The flame test is used to determine the unknown metal in a chemical. So for each metal found there is a corresponding color for example, copper is represented by the color green. This lab was really fun, I know that I enjoyed this and the teens did as well. I haven't had a chance to read the teens journals, but I am expecting the teens to had really positive feedback about the activity and what they learned.