Drop In Lessons

Things I've learned working with the kids on The Drop In:

1) make sure they have a specific plan before beginning. This means NO BUILDING at ALL until they've run the plans by me. We've had several false starts by groups who didn't have a clear idea of what they needed to accomplish. One group needed several starts and I'm not entirely sure even now that they understand their task.

2) have the plan in writing. I had them develop the idea on the wiki and, for the most part, went with their general outline. Mistake on my part. While two of the four groups could self-direct themselves, one "group" ended up with only one person doing all the work and the other group has been lackadaisical at best, mostly because I truly think they didn't (and don't)understand the task.

And by in writing, I mean -- on graph paper. We need to have discussions before hand about where single prims can do the work of many. I will make an attempt to clean up the prim usage once I have all the pieces, but to be honest, planning ahead would have saved a LOT of work.

3) All posters need to be approved BEFORE they are uploaded into SL. I actually had that rule set before, however, some followed that rule, some didn't. Those that didn't ended up with posters that didn't work (font too small, colors that didn't match, etc).

4) Set the number of prims allowed beforehand. We decided partway through on what the limit should be and by that point, one group was already over.

More to come...