Tech Club 10/25

For our first day at tech club, we observed the students from cohort #1 on their last day of tech club, and joined in on some interactions with the students.  Whittier elementary school has a very popular after school club from what I saw, there seemed to be 50+ students participating.  Tech club, however, is just one part of the after school program, and only students who want to go to tech club have to participate, so there are only a small number that we will be interacting with.  It sounds like it is often the same students each time, with sometimes a few extra on any given day. Yesterday there were 3 girls and 2 boys who came into the library for tech club.  There wasn't a specific plan for this day, the kids were allowed to play the instructional game of their choosing, and most of the students went to pbskids.org to play games.  While it seemed like the kids were pretty interested, sometimes it seemed as though they didn't really know what they should be doing and seemed to seek some kind of guidance.  For this reason I am hoping to provide pretty specific instructions for activities each week so the kids know what they should be doing and to help keep them interested in their activities.  I also think it will be important to establish some regular rules for the students to follow. There were a few times that students had to be told and retold to turn the volume down on their computers, things like that that will be easier to address right away and hopefully just one or a few times instead of every day.  In general I think this tech club will be relatively easy to manage with the large space we are provided, the individual laptops, and small number of students attending.  They seem like really good kids who are pretty funny, I look forward to seeing what we come up with together.