w10

March 27th, 2007

Students are very hard at work. I spent most of my time with Uvaldo's group, so they would try to divide up the work. While Uvaldo works on the structural part of the monorail, Javier and Syvina could work on site model. Madi should find something to do. He seemed to be motivated when he was drawing the cognitive map, but when the class shifted to model making session, he has finding it hard to get himself to work on anything. Froilan, Kenny, Evan, and James are catching up. Kenny has been trying to wet the basswood to bend it, but it didn't work out very well. I suggested that he should try using foamcore instead since basswood wasn't easy for him, but he's planning to use plastic waffle sheet. Students are learning which material is good for certain kinds of adhesives; zap for plastics, sobo and tacky glue for foamcores and basswoods. Brianna and Melaney has been creative with their basswood sticks, coloring the sticks to make it look more like greenery. I hope they work it out to show density of the green that sometimes it works as a wall, but sometimes it could be sparse enough to be seen through.


March 28th, 2007

Material shopping is fun when I find what I want.. preferably all at one store, parking spot would be a very basic requirement. I made two rounds at West LA Graphaids and couldn't find a decent parking spot, so I went all the way to the Culver City Graphaids.

Today was another usual day of model making. I asked students if they have a goal for today and if they know they are on track to finish the project before spring break, and they seemed confident with their pace. They know they won't be working on this project over the break. Froilan, Kenny, Evan, and James are catching up. James is mainly helping out Froi, because he broke his left arm several weeks ago. Kristine was happy with the general atmosphere of the class because in previous group projects, it was mostly one or two people working on the project and rest of the people just hanging around, and in this one, everyone is motivated to participate.

At the end of the class, I asked them to start cleaning up several minutes earlier than usual to make a short announcement since I was not coming back till April 19th, after their spring break. I told them to push to finish it before they take off for spring break. After they come back, they are going to be drawing another set of cognitive map responding to their enhancer. In the week after, they need to prepare themselves to present their work in the multi-purpose room, so they wouldn't have much time to work on the model after the break. I also asked them to review the reading materials that I handed out over the break just to remind themselves what had been brought up during the course.