Kristianstill

The 3rd week, and the 3rd week of growth. Thats great news. This is a credit to Andrew Sangster, my colleague for all the hard work he has put into the project so far. More good news, on Monday we received positive feedback on the DMGC Leader proposal. While there is still work to do on the final pitch, it has been very well received ticking a number of key funding foci. We are addressing inclusion, attendance, leadership, encouraging low aspirational white working class males to get involved in extra-curricular studies albeit with the caveat of gaming at the end of the session and ICT for girls. Of course we get to write our own curriculum for the workshops, now thats fun teaching. No specification to restrict you, no fear of failure for the staff or the students, we can go where the learning takes us and there is no deadline. When the students exhaust the software, we will change or rather they will tell us that they have had enough. Watch this space.

Now a reminder to self – in GIMP we are trying to create the posters for ICT at Hamble College. What if we created the artwork for the next SSAT conference and sent it in??

Well we didnt expect that! We had 46 students arrived and two can after other clubs. Thats nearly a 80% increase from week 1. We started with a few annoucements and then gave a short demo of GIMP. We were not expecting so many students, registration was awkward. I might asked if we can have an official register in Sims? Students dipped their toes in the graphics art water and we set a DMGC task of creating a piece of art work for the corridor.

We introduced the term Digital Leader and gave the Year 11 students the reponsibility of setting up and introducing the first game. What did we learn?

Now in two rooms, the younger students accidently joined the wrong server / game (in the other room). We now know to passward protect the game in each room.

We need more headsets – cost.

We are collecting small donations (no more than £1), but we need to raise £600 for a decent gaming headsets for both rooms. Donations need to be collected at the start but we do not want this to be an issue. Students do not have pay, but a small contribution is appreciated.

Year 11 students were fantastic. We expect that they will run next weeks session.

Set up a dummy server on which to run the game, running the server PC from a gamers/leaders PC caused the game to slow down.

At 5pm, students were disappointed that its finished? Is a 5pm finish late enough? If it was later would parents join us or make collection easier?

A bright start so far.