Running this outside a school

Out here nothing is provisioned. No tenancy, no IT department, no policy to point at, and often no way to reach a parent between one session and the next.

That sounds worse than it is. You also have no filtering to argue with, no procurement, and nobody to ask permission from, and most of what follows is about turning that into a decision rather than a gap.

Accounts, and why you probably hold the only one

Assume no participant has an account and none will get one during your session.

Under 18 usually means a parental permission you have no practical way to obtain for a drop-in group. So the default arrangement here is that you hold the account and drive one screen, with participants doing the specifying and the judging.

Treat that as the design rather than a compromise. It removes sign-ups from a session that may only be ninety minutes, it keeps you in front of everything that gets typed, and the learning sits in the specifying and the checking, which participants still do all of.

If you run with adults, or with a stable group of over-18s, they can hold their own accounts and the session gets easier.

Devices

Assume you have fewer than you want and that they are not yours.

Groups of three around one screen work well and are arguably better than one each, because the specifying has to be said out loud before it is typed.

If the venue has a laptop trolley, test it the week before with the actual tool on the actual network. Public buildings filter heavily, and the person who knows the password is often not in on a Saturday.

When the tool is blocked

Public networks block things and there is nobody to ask.

Find out before the session rather than in front of a room. If it is blocked, your phone as a hotspot with one laptop is a complete setup for the one-screen version.

If none of that works, you run on paper, and you should arrive expecting that some weeks. Print more than you need and treat the network as the optional part of your kit rather than the thing the session depends on.

Telling families, when there is no school to do it for you

You have no mailing list and no office. What you have is the moment someone is dropped off or signs up.

A short printed note, handed over or pinned at the desk, covering what the session does, that nothing identifying goes into the tool, and who to contact. That is proportionate for most settings and it is far better than nothing.

If your organisation already has a media or activity consent form, check whether it covers this. Often it is written broadly enough and nobody has looked.

Attendance you cannot count on

This is the real difference from a school and it shapes everything.

Assume every session has somebody new and somebody missing. Three consequences.

Each session has to stand alone, so do not open with a recap of a session half the room did not attend.

Boards go home with participants rather than into your bin. A board in a bag is the only continuity you have, and a participant who brings theirs back can pick up where they were.

And keep spares of everything printed. A lost sheet tends to surface once the session is already running.

When something breaks and nobody is coming to help

You are IT. Decide in advance what the session becomes if the network is down, and say it to the room plainly when it happens.

Running the paper version and naming why you are doing it is not a failure in front of participants. It is the clearest demonstration you will get of the difference between the tool and the thinking, and it is worth more than the session you planned.