Day Two

It's taken a few days to get round to writing up the second session - the arrival of a new kitchen set me back a little. It went well, but there were certainly some lessons to be learned.

I'd been looking forward to this session for some time. When I first had the idea of playing occasional games of Just a Minute, one of the things that occurred to me early on was that it would be very awkward to play it, as they'd all need to crowd round the keyboard. Musing on this, I came up with a solution: make a custom keyboard wired up to door bells.

I haven't had a chance to make a proper how-to guide yet, although I intend to do this next week. But in essence, what we did was to take a computer keyboard apart and wire doorbells to the appropriate switches inside, so that pressing a bell would make the computer think we'd pressed a key.

I knew this would be tricky to get right, and that we would be tight for time. My plan was to spend a few minutes playing a game of Just a Minute, then discuss how we could make it simpler, ending up with about twenty minutes making the thing and a quick game at the end. But I made a few mistakes, the first being that I left out the matchstick puzzle we'd been looking at the week before. This was too much of a distraction. I also didn't bring along enough screwdrivers, which meant a lot of sharing. And because we were rushing a bit, the end result didn't really work very well and we didn't have time to test it and fix it, which would have made it much more satisfying.

All that said, I think it was a success. The idea of looking inside the keyboard and understanding how it worked was a real hit, and the moment when they pressed the bell and a letter came up on the screen was great. It was pleasantly rowdy too.

I wanted to make a more finished and permanent version of the doorbell keyboard for next time, but that's not going to happen yet. But I think it's probably a good idea to switch to something a bit different and calmer next time, so we'll leave it another week. My plan for Day 3 is to do a session (possibly the first of a pair) on Stories and how they work, one of a number of sessions I plan to devote to critical thinking. Any suggestions about a good short story to read as an example would be happily received!