ICAT North Cross Exhibit

For eight days in mid-March, Virginia Tech's Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) held a camp for two hundred children from age 3 to the 5th grade at North Cross School in Roanoke, Virginia. The purpose of the camp was to engage children in a creative process with the use informal learning. Our group documented the camp, providing an impression of what happened over those eight days. On May 2, 2016, at the annual ICAT Day we presented an exhibit of our documentation. We have contributed to a portion of a much larger exhibit, containing other student projects and demonstrations by the ICAT staff, of informal learning methods they have used and taught community teachers to use.

We documented certain parts of the informal learning process using two methods. First, we filmed 360 degree video of both indoor and outdoor workshops. We have displayed the video using an Oculus Rift so that during ICAT Day a visitor to the exhibit is able to interactively view the children in action. Our second method of documentation is a set of audio reflections from students who participated in the workshops. Towards the end of the camp we had children reflect and then speak about their experience, creating art based on the Rudyard Kipling poem “If.” During ICAT Day, visitors connected with the children’s camp experience by browsing these experiences digitally using their smartphone or similar device.