Author
Ada Ren-MitchellPublished
June 10, 2024
On May 28th, 2024, PLIX’s Ada joined longtime PLIX Ambassador Melissa Sprenne, and Makerspace Facilitator, to co-facilitate a creative STEAM learning professional development workshop at Richland Library Ballentine in Irmo, South Carolina, for library staff of the Richland Library System.
Inspired by the Ballentine staff’s Dungeons and Dragons group, we designed the workshop activities as a narrative thread of adventure. Here are some the workshop design elements, what we did, and reflections!
Workshop design elements
- 📚 Activity notebook with slides — Instead of having everyone look at a screen, we printed our slides into booklets, inviting doodling, taking notes, and reflections. Slides were numbered so people can follow along, and where we needed links, we included a QR code.
- 🎴Facilitation Technique Cards and Persona Activity Cards — These were proven to be an effective learning tool during our PLIX Creative Learning Ambassador Program. We printed more for this workshop so participants can take their time digesting the creative learning facilitation techniques, and work through the Persona Activity together.
- ✂️ Playful materials — it was awesome working with a PLIX Ambassador, because Melissa had everything we needed for the different activities. We sent her extra materials, including 100 batteries(!), which got us in a bit of a hiccup going through proper shipping procedures.
- 🍿 Lots of snacks & music — We surveyed people’s favorite snacks and made sure to have plenty of them. Crafting and learning requires yummy calories! We also asked people to share their favorite music, to add to our workshop playlist. It was really nice to see participants rock out to their songs.
- 📸 Media release — We asked for consent to take photos, for the 1 (out of about 20) participant that didn’t want to have their photo included, we gave them a choice of a large paper bee or flower to wear so we know not to use the photos that have them in it.
Workshop schedule and what we did
- 🖍️ Warming up with a drawing activity — To help people get over the hesitation of crafting and drawing, we started with a drawing activity as a warm-up, asking people to draw different simple objects and emotions, each in under 10 seconds. The frequent spurts of laughter made it feel like it was a successful warm up.
- 🦸🏼♀️ Bringing to light individual superpowers — putting aside the copper in PLIX Paper Circuits, we asked people to create their own character and shine a light on their superpowers with just an LED, coin-cell battery, and craft materials. We gave participants plenty of time to introduce themselves and their superpowers.
- 🏖️ Digging deeper with clubhouses — After an introduction to PLIX, we introduced copper tape and invited groups to come up with their own Paper Circuits clubhouse. Clubhouses ranged from a haunted house with many rooms to a pool with lounge chairs and beach umbrellas
- 🥰 Introducing creative learning — After a short break, we thought about the role of a creative learning facilitator, the 8 PLIX Facilitation Techniques and practiced them using Personas Activity. This was introduced after playing with Paper Circuits so participants can easily connect the principles of creative learning to their recent experience.
- 🗺️ Crafting poetic lore with local historical maps — After lunch, we used local historical maps that Melissa found in Richland’s local history department resources to tinker with Spatial Poetry, building up the lore of the adventure space. People created, crafted, and shared a wide variety of beautiful poems based on maps.
- 🌀 Adapting PLIX activities with remix strategies — After taking some time to reflect, we learned about thought about the different strategies to remix, or adapt, PLIX activities to fit libraries’ local contents. Participants discussed library audiences that would love to try out the different PLIX activities.
- 🐛Taking a break for a nature walk — Because we were sitting in the one room for over 5 hours, Melissa took us on a nature walk along the library’s walking trail outside, pointing out skinks, frogs, poison ivy, and birds.
- 🏘️ Co-creating a fantasy neighborhood — Then we created a fantasy neighborhood, incorporating our clubhouses, including a haunted house, ice cream truck, crafts store, Blockbuster on Three Amigos Road, and a train on Rainbow Road.
- 🐙 Creating adventures in OctoStudio — After an introduction to OctoStudio, we created adventures in the fantasy neighborhood. Some participants included photos of the buildings and characters into their OctoStudio projects.
Afterwards, we chatted and shared ideas for supporting the different groups of people that came to different libraries, and to support PLIX’s future facilitation goals for different audiences.
Reflections
- Playing with STEAM activities and learning about creative learning for 8 hours straight was exhausting! We were tired after 6.5 hours, so we reduced the time for the last items on the agenda, and called it a successful day.
- People loved having the booklets instead of slides, and were able to flip back and forth to content they wanted to review. But some people got a little lost when we shifted things around to accommodate our dropping energy levels.
- Running creative learning workshops, I sometimes forget that not all adults are willing to jump in and start crafting.
- Having a Dungeons & Dragons inspired workshop was a lot of work to design and run! Especially since the different activities were new to people, it takes time to figure out the activity components before asking them to integrate it into something bigger. I was worried whether it made sense to participants’ experience that the flow of the workshop moved towards creating a fantasy OctoStudio adventure using their co-created neighborhood. In the end, it could have worked out without this thread. Though some people did create incredible OctoStudio projects incorporating the fantasy neighborhood, most people by the end, were having fun just trying it out.
What’s next?
Melissa plans to integrate creative learning trainings into the Richland Library System’s staff resources. There will be future PLIX workshops for Richland Library System staff, though much shorter and digestible. At PLIX, we will continue to iterate on our professional development workshop experience, and we’re thinking of developing more tools for library professionals to support different audiences.
🦖 The important question: Were there dungeons and dragons?
We didn’t have dungeons or dragons, but we did have a haunted house, which could have a dungeon. And instead of dragons, one of the participants showed us this 3D-printed T-Rex fossil she made for library teens to practice archeologically digging it out of a sand and plaster mix. Thanks, Amber!
