Session 1
Make one thing
- Who
- Anyone aged 13 and up, arriving with no preparation. Assume some people have never been to one of these and some were here last time.
- Where this sits
- Define and Decompose and Direct and Discern and Develop
- They leave with
- A page that runs, at Reveal or Navigate
- A board with their own handwriting on it, going home in a bag
- One card with a verb circled
The arc: 90 minutes
- 10 min
Opening question, in pairs or threes. Mix the table if you can.
What is it like to work with someone who is quick, capable, and does exactly what you say?
- 15 min
Boards out. Pick a subject you know and the machine does not. Fill the first column.
What do you know about this that nobody else in the room does?
- 10 min
The ladder, bottom two rungs only. Pick one. Write why next to it.
- 10 min
Card, on paper. Four lines. The fourth is how you will check.
- 25 min
Build it. You drive, or they do if the setting allows. Card first, then ask, then judge.
How would you know if that came back wrong?
- 15 min
Pass the screen to somebody who did not make it. Say nothing and watch.
- 5 min
Boards into bags. Say when the next one is and that it stands alone.
Look for
- First columns listing facts anybody could look up. The column wants what this person holds, which is a different thing.
- A rung picked with nothing written beside it. The reason is what gets checked when the page is built.
- Anyone waiting to be told what to make. Offer three subjects out loud and let them take one.
- Pairs where one person is doing all the talking. Ask the quieter one what they would check.
- Boards left on the table at the end. That is the continuity walking away.
- Before anything is typed, ask the person whose card it is how they would know it came back wrong. In a one-screen room you can do this out loud and the whole room hears an answer being tested.
Tips
- Ninety minutes is the design, and sixty works if you cut the ladder to two examples and shorten the build.
- Say at the start and at the end that each session stands alone. Somebody deciding whether to come back should know they have not missed a prerequisite.
- In a one-screen room, rotate who dictates the card. It is the only way everybody gets a turn at specifying.
- Have spare boards. Somebody will arrive without theirs and somebody will arrive for the first time.
Print before the session
One session, one complete loop. Plan it, build it, check it, take the board home.
This is the smallest version of everything the curriculum does, and it fits in ninety minutes because the rung is low and the subject is one the person already knows.