Graduate Student Seminar
I took my four-year old friend Ruby with me to school last night to help me teach a graduate student seminar. The goal of the evening was to divide the graduate students up into teams and have them design a game for Ruby to play. Each team had 30-minutes to create a game using an assortment of balloons, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, and other supplies that I purchased.
At the end of 30-minutes the graduate students taught Ruby how to play the game and we watched her reaction. The winning game was a puzzle game in which Ruby had to match objects with their silhouettes that were drawn on a foam core board. Then the teams then joined together and held a KJ session to develop this game further.
One of the graduate students responded, “I really enjoyed today’s seminar. Although children usually terrify me, having Ruby as a guest was a fun change of pace. It was a fun challenge to work with a a client who has completely different needs and wants than I usually encounter…I was impressed by how much progress we made by the end of the class simply by building off of seemingly wacky ideas.”