Week 6 began with the students sorted into their official teams for the first time, and kicked off the second phase of the course, the Design Phase! The students met in their teams — Team Video, Team Engineering, Team Outreach, and Team Storytelling — and determined what each team needs to contribute to the class project, what each student brings to each team, and how they will work together to create our #thrashmob to #torchthegreen.
Each team prepared a (draft) list of milestones / action items that the teams will need to meet / complete to achieve the class goals by the end of the semester. The students were reminded that we are not just creating a flash mob here, but a video to promote Innovation at FSU that builds to the flash mob (in some way, to be determined) as its essential gimmick or central feature.
We spent a lot of time discussing the essential milestones coming up, including a pilot test of a smaller flash mob in class on March 2, the end of the Design Phase on March 9, and the beginning of the Development phase after the students return from Spring Break on March 21. The students then only have a few short weeks before the Torch the Green! #thrashmob on Landis Green at 2:00pm on April 6, and then only a couple of weeks after that to wrap up their video promoting FSU as a Center for Technological Innovation.
We took a class field trip to the top floor of Landis Hall to check out the video vantage points from that location, and we also had a guest speaker from the Department of Dance — Heather Boni — who discussed the Sky Art Projects that she has worked on with Daniel Dancer — http://www.artforthesky.com/ — with various student groups in Tallahassee. The students learned a lot from her presentation about different methods for coordinating group art projects. Finally, we continued to work with various groups on campus, including FSU’s Emergency Management program, to determine the best way to video our class project from above.