So on Monday we came together to further plan what we will be doing next Monday. Just to recap we are running a workshop on inventions for a class of grade 3’s at their school. Using the idea’s we had brainstormed we began to think about how we could present and impart some knowledge on these students. We started by thinking abut how we could start it, the first thing discussed was what type of experts the students could be in the drama. A big list was thought of inventors, technicians, engineers, designers, salesmen, consumers and more. I’m not really sure if we discussed the warm ups first or the suggestions for what was being invented and for what reasons was it needing to be invented. I think it was the warm ups. Jo detailed some games that involved students getting into groups and building inventions with their bodies so like cars, jets, washing machine etc. I also think machines were suggested at this point as well which is when the groups build a working machine with a sound and a noise to accompany.

When then attacked the problem of what invention we could go for and what was the reason for needing it. I believe inventing new toys came up first and Darcy threw in a suggestion for a good warm up game in a similar motif. It was called museums or something similar but we would change it to a toy shop. In the shop when closing a cleaner would be cleaning the shop but the toys were alive and had to try and touch the cleaner without her noticing. We decided this wouldn’t work that well with grade three’s because they wouldn’t grasp the idea of the acting as a specific toy within the context of the game that well. We discussed toys for a bit throwing ideas that the students were at a conference for the innovation of new toys. The idea didn’t really get far because it lacked a dramatic structure, so we moved on.

The next suggestion was robots which was ultimately not taken up for various reasons but got us more focused on the purpose of the invention and why it needed to be invented. A few suggestions were thrown out and the idea of transport was quickly taken up and expanded on easily so it was the theme we stuck with. The idea was that the student’s had been called together because they were the top of their field for engineering, design, inventing and the like to develop idea’s which may not be viable now but will be in the future for transportation, this following in the step of Leonardo Di Vinci and his design of a helicopter. Jess said something about a movie about a child inventor ‘meet the Robinsons’ I think and told us about a science fair in the movie. This got Jo onto the idea of that and soon enough those who had attended the meeting had been given a grant and they had to bring their machine to the fair and show how it worked. So we pretty much had the lay out of the lesson which was the warm ups - machines and the machine body building, students create their own role (name, occupation), conference with 4 teacher in roles (I’m playing the innovation and future guy), students to design a invention for transport that takes into account current situation of the world in groups, they are then to come back to the conference as their characters and discuss what they have designed, then they will all be awarded grants and have to attend a fair to showcase their ideas doing a little drama about it, finally we will discuss what they have learnt.

That was pretty much the lesson, except my home work is to come up with about 30 seconds of dialogue for my teacher in role which I’m still thinking about.