Dinosnore Blog Post

George Baldwin

The 2014 Dinosnore event was a huge success. 75 people attended, including guests from Queens, New York. The introduction events went smoothly, and we all had a great time eating pizza, playing Dance Dance Revolution, and meeting new people. The Bay and Paul fellows, wearing festive custom Bay and Paul t-shirts, soon took over, and introduced the Bay and Paul aspect of the event. The students were split into three groups using color coded name tags, which served to introduce them to people they may not have spoken to or worked with before. Our six Bay and Paul fellows ran three stations, and had rotations of 25 students between them.

Zariah and I ran an icebreaker station that included two games. The first activity organized the group members into a circle. Small notecards and crayons were passed around, and they each shared out loud and wrote down one item they own that best represented them. After everybody in the circle had gone around, mentioning things like a laptop or fishing rod, they were assigned numbers one to three, again splitting up the group. These smaller groups were each a team, and they had all been shipwrecked on a deserted island. The only materials they had were the items on their cards. Each group had to come up with a solution to either survive on the island, or escape to safety using the items within their group. The activity turned out to be a lot of fun, and the groups really enjoyed it. We tied the icebreaker together with a lesson on looking at things in different ways, and being creative in their re-use of items.

Our second activity ran a little differently. The students were again split into three groups, but this time with different people. Their objective was to create the lamest environmental-themed superhero they could, with three unique powers. The group with the most creative, lamest, and overall original superhero won. Our example was Captain Planet, holding several amazing powers, such as the ability to turn into a tree, but only once, and it's permanent. The power to summon unlimited amounts of wasps, but he can't control them, or make them go away. And perhaps his greatest earth-saving gift: He can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, but only one molecule at a time. The groups really enjoyed this activity, and we had fun hearing their crazy ideas.

These activities were a lot of fun to run, and we enjoyed getting to know the Evolutions kids from other classes. We received a lot of positive feedback, and good constructive criticism. The lessons we learned will help us run the Maya conference, and make the activities run much smoother by decreasing transition time, clarifying directions, and getting more involvement and enjoyment out of our participants.