We've had a busy weekend!  While the students' reflections will be far more detailed and personal than mine, I'll give you a run down of the last couple of days with a few pictures.  Saturday began and ended with some serious work, but was mainly a trip out to Stratford to see the Stratford Festival production of The Tempest.  In sequence:

First, we looked at product design from a user perspective.  The boys paired up and asked either questions around what they like and need in a wallet and then they had to make their partner a wallet.  I found it interesting that some of the boys asked questions that helped them get to know their partner better.  Questions like, "Are you an introvert or extrovert?" and, "What's you're favourite colour?" rather than "What kind of wallet do you want?"

From that brief challenge, we hopped on the bus and headed to the Costume and Prop Warehouse for the Stratford Festival. 
It was very cool to see not only costumes for productions going back the entire 65 year history, but how many of the more intricate ones were designed and built to simulate certain materials and textures or to enable quick changes.  Lunch preceded the drive to the main Festival Theatre, with a brief pause for a particularly slow moving and entitled parade of swans.  The production of The Tempest was outstanding.  Mr Hillis had prepped the students with a brief plot synopsis and made them aware of particularly important themes and this helped us all to understand the work at a deeper level.  What was particularly unique about this production was the fact that Prospero, the wizard and father of Miranda was played by a woman, who had made her Stratford debut in the role of Miranda many decades ago.  The implications of having a woman in a traditionally male role made for interesting discussion in our post performance chat with a couple of the cast.  The boys made some very insightful observations and asked particularly astute questions.  For many, the highlight of the afternoon was that half hour discussion about the play!

After returning to the campus, the boys spent some time on their Create Value Challenge after doing a couple of different challenges to get their brains in gear.  One was a negotiation activity where, in pairs, both parties had to negotiate how they would split $2.  The parameters would change and they would have to come to an agreement on the value of this money.  Then they looked at creativity through a timed circle challenge where they had to draw in 30 circles given some specific constraints.  Once their brains were engaged, they got to spend some more time working our details of their Create Value challenge project with their partners. 

First thing Sunday morning, we headed off to Google where we spent the day.  While the space that we were in is new and un-developed as of yet, it was cool to be one of the first groups to use the only Google Community space of it's kind in the world.  The day started with more of a tech focus as the boys started by using various conductive materials as controllers for their laptops.   From there, they moved on to learning to program Arduino micro-controller boards.  While the use in these beginning projects was fairly basic, the use of this type of micro-controller board is an inexpensive way of automating any number of projects as the software is uploaded to the board then the board can run independent of any other computer.  It is a free-standing simple computer that can run interfaces, sensors, and even small robots.

After lunch, there was discussion around computational thinking, what it is and how one might use it, in and outside of computer programming.  Then, they were organized into groups to build staircases that would hold one of the program coordinators, and ultimately, with luck, Mr Crompton.  It was interesting to watch how the teams constructed their staircases, and how some of the strategies explored earlier in the year were utilized. 

The day ended with the most stressful challenge of the week.  I won't speak of the details of the challenge itself as we hope that this is something that we will do again in future trips, but I will say that this activity will not soon be forgotten.  The lessons learned revolved around teamwork, leadership, problem-solving, questioning ones beliefs.  I would encourage you to read the student blogs to find out their thoughts on their time and particularly what they learned in the dice challenge.