My wife is a theatre director in Austin. Occasionally I get manipulated into bailing out her technical director. I don't have book smarts but can envision a widget in my head as someone describes it to me and then build it without prints.
My 1st go was a ship for The Little Mermaid musical. All the direction I got was a top down base sketch of the general size. She also said the ship needed to be 4 pieces, break apart, and the mast had to fall. The kids and I put in a total of 467 volunteer hours on this project.
This is what I came up with (scene from ship wreck during storm)
2nd was a moving modular 2 story set for Newsies the musical. Caveat was that the 2 structures had to be able to be pushed together and complement each other with kids crossing from one to the other. I accomplished this with mating gates on spring hinges and latches to hold them open. Oh yeah, and it had to be modular in case any other schools wanted to use them in the future. We had 512 volunteer hours build these bad boys. Pictures below.
Teaching kids now days is hard. They have no imagination. I give a class each month where I give them an idea about an object and they have to sketch, design, and build it without electronics. We do brainstorming events where the entire group has input and the project morphs. Ideas are challenged and each kid is expected to defend their input without confrontation. This helps them learn collaboration and how to yield if others have better input. They also get to see how each person, no matter who they are, can provide valuable feedback and direction.
My 1st go was a ship for The Little Mermaid musical. All the direction I got was a top down base sketch of the general size. She also said the ship needed to be 4 pieces, break apart, and the mast had to fall. The kids and I put in a total of 467 volunteer hours on this project.
This is what I came up with (scene from ship wreck during storm)
2nd was a moving modular 2 story set for Newsies the musical. Caveat was that the 2 structures had to be able to be pushed together and complement each other with kids crossing from one to the other. I accomplished this with mating gates on spring hinges and latches to hold them open. Oh yeah, and it had to be modular in case any other schools wanted to use them in the future. We had 512 volunteer hours build these bad boys. Pictures below.
Teaching kids now days is hard. They have no imagination. I give a class each month where I give them an idea about an object and they have to sketch, design, and build it without electronics. We do brainstorming events where the entire group has input and the project morphs. Ideas are challenged and each kid is expected to defend their input without confrontation. This helps them learn collaboration and how to yield if others have better input. They also get to see how each person, no matter who they are, can provide valuable feedback and direction.
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