My iPhone recently alerted me that I have filled it’s photo taking capacity to the brim, which means I had to upload a bunch of photos to my computer.  This is awesome, because I have tons of photos from the “recent past” to share.  Going through the photo stream brought to focus how much has happened in the past few months!  We’ve been all over the place getting ready for opening day.  I will review the phone highlights now, and go into depth with some of these events later this week. 

The team has kept busy on the weekends down at Market Collective.  For our April event we invited market goers to build a cardboard forest and for the May event we asked people about their favourite places in Calgary and within Alberta.

If you helped us with this project, you're awesome! Also click to see larger image.

If you click to enlarge this image, you can see that someone annotated one of their favourite places in Alberta to be the home of a cool cat. I support cool cat spotting!

Later in May we were exhibitors’ at Calgary’s International Children’s Festival!   You can read up on what we were up to here. 

In spite of the rain, Children's Fest is the best! Great theatre festival for all ages! My favourite show this year was Circus Incognitus. So wonderful and whimsical!

We continued with in-house fabrication of programming materials including electricity blocks, shadow puppet screens, and marble machines. 

Jeff and I sanding down blocks to be used for an electricity program. And Mr. Bill working hard on project construction. Any opportunity to work in the shop makes me the happiest person ever.

 A team of us has emptied out our programming supplies from all over the building and our external warehouse, all into one centralized area in the former WowTown.  These before and after shots should give you an idea of all the materials we currently have in house. 

WowTown is the former 'Iceberg Room' turning Titanic. It is huge. It is now filled with every programming material we've ever owned. We're working on getting it organized. It's like a more pleasant episode of Hoarders.

This is essentially the accumulation of 44 years of materials all in one room. We've tossed and recycled a lot of thngs we will never use, but we are still getting ready for our move. More on this later!

We found some weird things while cleaning up. Like several relic floppy disks and a sassy 'Grandma' calendar...

Offsite visits in July!  Katherine, myself and Lia Rogers from Dorkbot Calgary went to check out the Open Studio Day for the R.I.P. Workshop in Banff. 

We’ve had several meetings an entire Content Team to discuss and map out our deliverables and align our priorities for opening day.  All employee training has kicked off  as well.   We meet every Tuesday and Thursday so that upon completion, every member of staff from finance, house keeping, programs etc., will have the skills that they need to be a facilitator at the New Science Centre!  Training has been a blast!   

Photos of organizational meetings, which are essential at this point. And the middle right hand photo is from a training session where we re-created the colour of a memorable sky in our lives.

Also  – super exciting news –  last week the exhibits for Open Studio have arrived to two weeks ago to the New Science Centre Site!  Installation has commenced! 

These are not my iPhone photos. But I still felt the need to share them!

We’re going to get even busier now, so we try to squeeze fun in whenever we can!  Even if it’s jumping rope in the hallway.  

Dana jumping rope!

Stay tuned.  A lot of updates (both current and retrospective) to come! 

-Claudia

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If you haven’t read Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, and you work in any creative or idea driven field, I highly suggest you read it NOW.  The Manifesto really helps steer me in a constructive direction when I need to refocus.  I’ve been trying to get several projects organized right now, and the blog seemed like a really great place to organize some of my thoughts.    With that in mind, today let’s focus on Manifesto Point #9:

“BEGIN ANYWHERE – John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis.  His advice:  begin anywhere”.

This notion is such a relief, and when starting a project, knowing that you can begin anywhere, and truck along towards progress is really the way to go.  This is the thinking behind how we developed our new grade 6 air program.  At the initial concept development stage for this program, I was super stuck.  These poorly drawn diagrams illustrate what direction this program was going in, but it didn’t feel right for several reasons.  So I discussed with various team members. 

Figure 1. Initial brainstorming...

Figure 2. More brainstorming and poorly drawn diagrams.

Everything brainstormed sounded like a) something a teacher could do in their classroom just as well as we could b) something that could lead to ‘fake science’ notions c) just tired and less relevant than the ideal final outcome.  My lab mate Katherine noticed my mental block and after chatting it out we discovered that a) I was stuck on learning outcomes instead of ‘cool things we can do with air’ and b) we needed to have a mini rig with the rest of the team. 
The functional definition of a rig may be floating around somewhere else on this blog, but just as a refresher:  RIG – Rapid Idea Generation.  For our purposes, we just got everyone in the lab, and they had one task that they had to do: prove to me that air exists.  They could use any of the bins in the lab, any material that was necessary to prove to me that air exists.  I told them I didn’t believe air existed because I can’t see it.  They found SEVERAL VERY AMAZING ways to prove to me that air exists. 

Figure 3. Alan said he could prove to me that air exists if I got into this plastic bag. I ignored common sense and jumped in...

Figure 4. Stacey helped arrange the plastic bag, while Alan got the vaccuum ready.

Figure 5. Alan gets his experiment on the go. All you need is one volunteer (me), a vacuum, and a plastic bag and you can really feel the change in air pressure as you are vaccuum sealed into a plastic bag.

Figure 6. This experiment was not as affective with two people in the plastic bag...but we were trying to see how many people could potentially be included in this experience.

Figure 8. Pat did not expect the sudden change in air pressure/intense quishing sensation. Thanks for trying it out Pat!

Figure 9. Look carefully at this photo! Alex made himself an 'air detector'. It was so great! Essentially a glorified headband with a propeller (red thing over his head) so you can SEE when air is interacting with it! Look at him go!

Figure 10. Stacey, Alan, myself and half of Alex's head watching the other developer's present their proof that air exists.

Figure 11. This photo does not need a caption.

From here we were able to hone in on some things that felt right, and were more in line with the direction I wanted to take the air program.  I really liked the idea of ‘air detectors’ as a concept.  Although the air detector hat Alex created was not the most tangible idea, I loved the idea of having students prove to the facilitator that air exists by doing their own experiments; having them use what they already know about air to prove its existence.  This created a concept to move this program forward, and the rest of the developers helped me select bins of materials I could use when testing.  They selected tons of great materials including aluminum foil, tissue paper, packaging peanuts, cellophane, coloured gels, Mylar, tinsel, Tygon tubing, other tubing, turkey basters, propellers, plastic straws, plastic bags, bubble wrap, Nalgene containers, balloon pumps, air pumps, other pumpy devices, gliders, turbines, dryer tubing.  It was awesome to realize that that as a group of developers, we moved this program from a good future program, to what may be a great future program. 

Figure 12. A much more exciting batch of programming ideas. Thanks everybody!

I know the above Post-It Notes scan is pretty blurry, which is intentional, to leave you in suspsense!  I’ll follow up on how this program pilot went shortly; in the meantime I will leave you with Manifesto Point#3

 “Process is more important than outcome – when the outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we’ve already been.  If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.”

-Claudia

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