What's Cooking?

Delicious chicken stir fry.  And the teens at Kids' Cafe are such experts that they didn't even need a recipe. Here are a couple photos from yesterday afternoon . . . only a couple, though, because everyone got shy and asked me not to use their pictures.  Too bad.  They were great pictures!

We found our App!

A few days ago, I wrote about our adventures in stop-motion animation and bemoaned the fact that we just didn't have an app for the iPads that let us do everything we wanted to do all in one place.  Well, we found that app.  It's called Stop Motion Studio, and we're having so, so, so much fun with it.

First, I made a very, very quick animation of someone drawing a picture:

Then, the afterschoolers spent some time making their own movies.  At first, they didn't completely get the idea, and they just took a ton of pictures that then got mashed together.

After that, though, they started to get the hang of it.  One important lesson that I learned?  Afterschoolers can get impatient, and it really, really bugs them then they can't just move around a lot and have the animation just automatically work.

One way of animating that appealed to the ways that the kids wanted to work was to have the youth work on an activity while someone photographed it.  The result looked a lot like super-fast filming:

And then there were the youth who just wanted to dance!

 

Stop-motion Animation

We've been spending some time working on stop-motion animation lately.  This first movie is one that we made using iMovie on the iPads, featuring Hassan:

The iPads are great for capturing a lot of photos quickly and then funneling them right into iMovie, but there doesn't seem to be any way to turn off the Ken Burns effect when you're using iMovie on an iPad, so the stop-motion animation made with those can make you a little sea-sick.  Also, you have to adjust the length of the clips and remove the fade-in/fade-out transitions manually.

For this next video, we took photos using the digital cameras and then loaded them into Windows Movie Maker.  It takes longer to pull the photos off the camera, but you can set the length of the pictures before you import them, and you don't have to remove any transitions.  This video was made by Flastine and Rotha.  The part with the growing clay-person was Flastine's, and the part with the turtle was Rotha's:

This final video was made by Olive.  I believe if you look in the back, you'll see a meteor hitting the clay-person's house.  Poor clay-person!

Working on Comics

Yesterday in the afterschool, we made some comics.  First, we played around with the app:

And then, we started a graphic novel of Little Red Riding Hood.

I wonder what story we'll tell today?

Teen Tech Workshop

Phew!  A busy teen tech workshop today, and we're making some good progress on our online yearbook.  Will we make our deadline?  Here's hoping!  

Check out this screenshot of the Talent Extravaganza page in progress:

Tutor Thank-You Video

A giant thank you to all the tutors who help King Street kids with homework every day!

King Street Surveys

Over the past two weeks, Tech Workshop has taken a backseat to survey completion. Every April, we survey all the kids, volunteers, and parents at King Street to find out what's working and what we can get better at. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Number of children who asked for a bigger building or a pool: 23

2. Most popular King Street activity: play in gym, with 94% of people selecting it as one of their favorite things.

3. Second most popular King Street activity: Tennis at the Edge, with 84% of people selecting it as one of their favorite things.

4. Quote that just makes you feel good? When asked, "What do you wish was different about King Street?", one youth answered, "I wish nothing was different. I wish it was like this. And it is like this."

But, even though tech workshop has been on hold over the past two weeks, we've still had some time to make a few movies. Here's one of our favorites: