Thank you to everyone who helped me with this project. I was so lost and overwhelmed when this project started, but thanks to all my friends and everyone who sent me suggestions, inspiration, and advice, the project was a success. There's nothing like a surplus of creative ideas to boost one's confidence for an event like this. We helped out some children, had a lot of fun, and provided an educational experience for both my teenage volunteers and the children at the orphanage.
The theme of the evening was "Visualizing Science & Technology" and involved the children breaking into small teams led by my teenage volunteers. Each group was given a question to answer, like "What don't you know about but would like to learn?" or "What do you think is the most significant technology today?" or "What do you see your lifestyle being like 10 years from now?" In response to these questions, the children cut out pictures from magazines and made storyboard collages on construction paper with magazines donated by the PCC natural science department.
Afterward, I gave a 35 minute interactive lecture on some of the more contraversial technologies that have been developed by various companies, that have yet to hit the market. The children and I talked about these technologies to verbally paint a picture of life 10 years from now and the orphans got in an interesting debate with eachother over the ethics and privacy issues of some of these technologies.
For the final component, I talked a little bit about the open software market and showed them Edubuntu, a distribution of Linux made for schools. They all got to play very briefly with Edubuntu on an old P3 computer we brought, and then we donated the computer to the orphanage when we were done with the presentation. The computer is going to go in there library.
All of the children had a lot of fun and had some very insightful discussions.
The kids loved it and they want me to have another similiar event soon. The orphanage has invited us back if we ever want to go back. Some of the teenage volunteers also want to be involved in any follow-up events we hold there.
Thank you so much.
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One other note that I find interesting:
Prior to giving the presentation, I made a decision regarding this event. Basically, I refused to "dumb it down". The questions were kind of complex for 10 year olds, the topics being discussed pretty heavy, and the moral issues really direct and contraversial.
And for the most part, the children followed along with the discussion and had excellent insights and comments. There were times when we had to back up and re-discuss ideas, but even that went along smoothly because at leas they asked. Altogether, it was everything I could hope to find in a college-level discussion and I reveled in it.
There there was this funny interuption early on in the introductions:
Child: (raises her hand)
Me: "Yes?"
Child: "You use big words."
Me: "I'm glad you noticed."
The point is that despite my commitment not to dumb things down in every way and to treat these kids as I would college students, they really followed along and were enaged in the discussions and projects at every stage. It helped that the creative storyboard excersize had them already talking about some of this stuff before the official discussion even began since they were cutting from science and technology magazines.
I was very pleased. Everyone had such a good time.