pics from July programs!

I'm playing a bit of catch-up here, as I was sadly neglecting posting pics of the Summer events as they were happening! But here's some of the stuff that went down in July!

On Wed, July 2, 12 teens came to check out the MaKey MaKey Workshop! I've described MaKey MaKey on the blog previously, but simply put, it allows you to hook up anything to your computer and as long as it conducts electricity, the computer will think it's a keyboard button or a mouse button! This allows for some pretty creative contraptions, and I made sure there were lots of various supplies on demand to use, such as chopsticks, tin foil, pennies, marshmallows, bananas and paper and pencils (pencil graphite is a bit conductive, so your drawings can become buttons)! We had a good time using various inputs to play Flappy Bird, Canabalt, and other simple games, as well as using a simple drumming program to make different items play sounds when touched! We'll be doing this program again in August at the Municipal branch.

Using drawings to operate a Dance Dance Revolution game!

On Wednesday, July 23, we had 16 teens show up to throw things out the second story window!! We had an Egg Drop Contest, where everyone got into five small groups and designed contraptions to protect an egg from a two-story fall. They had one hour to build whatever they wanted from the materials given. I was surprised that all five survived the drop!! That's it, next time I'm giving less stuff to use, I want to see some broken eggs here!

The view out the 2nd story window!

parachutes were a popular theme!

On Tuesday, July 29 at the Municipal branch we had a Minecraft Craft day! There were four stations of different Minecraft-related crafts of various difficulty. There were Perler Beads out to make Minecraft-themed necklaces, duct tape, markers and Velcro to make creeper bracelets, papercrafts of various monsters and items from the game, and Minecraft coloring sheets! In addition we had some iPads running the Pocket Edition and my PS3 was running Minecraft projected onto a screen for anyone that wanted to play. Almost everyone made a Perler Bead necklace and papercraft and we all hung out and talked about Minecraft with each other, which was cool.

Finally on Wednesday, July 30th we had 16 teens show up for the Build a Brush Bot program! Using a small motor, a AAA battery, some wire and a glue gun, we made little vibrating bots. (They're close to Hex Bugs, actually). This was a fun program and everyone's bots came out looking a little different!

Here's my example Brush Bot that I made

Summer programming is winding down a little bit for August, but we've still got some cool stuff coming up! As I mentioned, we'll be doing the MaKey MaKey again at Municipal. And we'll also be doing the Minecraft Craft event that took place at Municipal at Sellers on Tuesday! I'm even planning to add one more special papercraft to the event, if you give your Minecraft username, I'll print out a papercraft of your character! We've been doing teen movies every month for the past couple months, and at the end of August we'll have a special screening of Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, a Minecraft documentary by 2 Player Productions. The movie is drop-in, but the other events do require registration, so if you think you'd like to come, be sure to sign up, it may be waiting list only pretty soon!

Minecraft Building Competition!

Last Wednesday, 22 teens came to Sellers Library to build in our first Minecraft Building Competition. Players had the option to play the PC edition (by either using a library PC or bringing in their own laptop) or playing the Pocket Edition (by either using an iPad provided by the library or using their own device of tablet of choice). Once everyone was situated, players were given two hours to build a treehouse of their own design. Game modes were set to creative, so players were allowed to use whatever they wanted to build. They were given a choice of either a jungle biome (by using seed "502661284222987106") or a forest biome (using seed "wolfies!"). With no jungle biome option in the Pocket Edition yet, players were given a seed for a forest biome, "Notchisacreeper".

After their two hours of creation time were up (which everyone agreed seemed to go much too fast!) I walked around to see what everyone had made. Creations were judged on three main criteria:

• concept and originality
• adherence to the theme
• technique and execution

Winners William and Billy

I scored each criteria on a scale of 1 to 10, then added the totals for each person's total ranking. I really think I had the hardest task of anyone, as it was REALLY hard to decide who should win, there were a ton of great creations! In the end, Billy won the PC competition prize, a life-size foam iron sword, and William won the Pocket Edition prize, a life-size foam pickaxe. Angela took home second place in the PE, and Sean took home second place in the PC edition, two tickets each to Eastern State Penitentiary. Like I said, it was really hard deciding on winners, there were so many creative creations!

While everything went pretty smoothly, there were some things that I plan to look into for future Minecraft events. Firstly, I would have loved if we could all have been on the same server, playing in the same world. My original plan was for everyone to walk around each other's treehouses during the judging phase, including myself. Then when the competition was over I could back up the world containing everyone's creations and put it online for everyone to see. The other problem was with the library's PC lab, which really strained to play Minecraft. Two people had their games crash while playing. I think next time the PC edition will be limited to those that can bring their own laptops.

I hope to do more Minecraft programs in the future. One of the great things about Minecraft is that there's so different things that can be done with it (although another building competition is certainly a possibility). It seems like everyone had a great time. Thanks to everyone that came!

Billy made a tree with a house inside! (PC)

This was a pretty amazing homemade tree! (PC)

Angela's tree house had trees topped with cakes! (PE)

Water slide! (PE)

Not sure how SAFE a roof of glass with a pool of lava is, but it looked nice! (PE)

Matt made some impressive pixel art! (PE)