Our group went into this week with more of an agenda than we had in previous weeks. With only a few meetings left, we decided to devote each meeting to tackling one scene in our act. There were only two students this week, which we are used to, but I think it was harder to engage with them this week. The students decided to take on more of an artistic role and dedicate our meeting time to drawing out scene one cartoon-style. They had expressed interest in drawing out each scene since day one so I think they were definitely excited to start drawing. One student even brought his own materials from home which gave us the impression he had been thinking about this for a while and was actually excited about the project. Sometimes it is hard to gage our student’s attitudes toward this project, but seeing him drawing and focus on how to depict scene one was good feedback for us that they are actually excited and look forward to our meetings. Next week we hope to see what they have for scene one and work on scene two.

Our meeting this week was marred by technological errors. The Google Meet was acting up and kept glitching, pausing, and even booting group members from the meeting every once and awhile. Our meeting was during some pretty serious rainstorms, so we think it may have impacted our connection. We did get it working for a short amount of time and were able to talk to the kids more about their drawings, and they started to work on a few, but eventually, the technology issues started again. Unfortunately, we didn’t get much done but I communicated with them over email and we are hopeful that the students will make some progress on their drawings this week. Luckily we feel we are in a good place overall with the project, so this wasn’t the end of the world. We are hopeful that they continue to make some progress this week and will reevaluate what we need to do going forward.

Our second meeting with our kids went much better than the first one. While the kids were a little shy at first, we ended up having a very productive meeting. We started by creating a short document listing the main characters and the basic plot points of each of our scenes, which really helped to convey what was happening to the kids. Afterward, we talked with the kids about how they want to portray the different scenes. They seemed split between drawing and using action figures, so we settled on a compromise of drawing some backgrounds and using the action figures as the characters to act out the scenes. After that, we discussed each of the scenes and talked about some of the scenes, and gave the kids some ideas about what they could draw. The students seemed to get more excited and into the project after talking about it in detail. It was a very promising second meeting and I am excited to see what the kids make in the coming weeks. I thought creating a worksheet for the kids so that they could look at who the characters are and an outline of what happens in each scene was really helpful for us and them. Given the difficulties with communication over Google Meet, giving the kids a visual resource really helped us communicate key aspects of the project. I am excited about what they are going to come up with in the coming weeks.