Minutes:GGHC2011 2011-03-21

Began at 7:30 PM

Members in attendance:

• Mario Corsetti
• Nate Warnick
• Ryan Busch
• Ed Platt
• Rocco, just Rocco.
• Ross Smith
• Aaron Dubin
• Laurie Dubin
• Matt Switlik

• Ed reviews the PDF we received describing the contest, its purpose, the goals

Meeting adjourned at 8:40 PM.

Judging Criteria

1. How reproducible is the project?
2. How easily can the project parts be sourced anywhere in the world?
3. How low-cost is the project?
4. How well-documented is the project?
5. How relevant is the project to helping education today?
6. How inventive and creative is the design and build of the project?

Ideas:

• Translate the project documentation into several languages to extend the global scope
• Consider hackerspaces and contacts worldwide to provide information to us about project "buildability" and usefulness
• Holy grail: an electronics project that a classroom can build and then use.  Kids learn to build hands-on and then get to use the project as part of a lesson plan
• Mario: To keep the scale down (5 microcontrollers and power sources instead of 30), let's think of classroom set-ups like "buzzer games" where 5 students participate in a rotating game that everyone else gets to watch
• Ross: Project may be a long-running project that builds up, allowing kids to experiment by writing components and software for it, and which submits its results to a global site or interchange for others engaged in the same platform
• Ed: We're building a prototype; don't have to figure out a business production process, just build a working demo of the concept
• Project does not need to necessarily be a learning project for students to build; it could solve a systemic problem in the classroom, or outside of the classroom
• Aaron: A project that downloads a lot of content to a portable laptop or system for distributing content to internet-less areas
• Rocco: A portable projector with a flat lens for enlarging projections
• Let's do some video posts with our blogs

• Ed reviewed our 6-week schedule and the blog post milestones we are asked to adhere to
• Mario volunteers his classroom and students to test our crazy invention on
• After reviewing Smartytask, we reviewed the major project roles and delegated them.  Consult the online Smartytask project to see the owners of each major role.
• Ed's key brainstorming and logistic goal for this week: land on ideas we can deilver, following this process.  Agreed to these meetings and schedules:
• Step 1 - teacher input
• Step 2 - generate ideas (no ideas are bad!  Brainstorming) - Saturday the 26th, 5:00 PM
• Step 3 - filter ideas (shoot them down until we have a short list) - Tuesday, the 29th, "7:00 PM"

• Considered some triage of questions we could ask.  A coherent [questionnaire] would be very helpful as we may not have the time to "dwell among the teachers" and identify all the situations we can help them with.  Pointed questions are easier to get answers to, but without time to observe and get context, the answers have less meaning.  We have to strike a balance between observing (very useful but takes time) and making pointed questionnaires (gets more pointed data of broad scope but with less context).
• Agreed to meet Saturday, 5:00 PM, in the whiteboard room, after getting teacher feedback, as a dinner break from Potlock.

Questions for our panel:

• What do they consider a mobile/portable power source?
• How will reimbursement work?
• How much video footage are you looking for?  Do you want mini updates or are you hopingn we collect bojllions of minutes?
• Do we need to get releases if we're videotaping anyone?  Do you have a release we can use?