Gearing up for the School Year

Getting ready for the new year requires a lot of narrowing down what I need to cover before the students start interacting after school.  In addition, what can I do to help them have a feel for the problems being presented so they can make an informed choice?  So here are the priorities:

1. Teamwork - how to work productively on a team
2. Basic concepts - Brainstorming, engineering design - can be taught with slightly longer projects like the Marshmallow Challenge, but I DON'T want to use that one, because most of the students have done that one several times.
3. Creativity - largely embedded in other activities - will get explicit later.
4. Spontaneous - starting with verbal since we will be doing design projects for the above and those resemble hands-on problems.
5. Introduce each problem through video or project. 
Problem 1 - curling video, vehicle design problem,
Problem 2 - create Emoji spontaneous problem?
Problem 3 - Nick Tickle and True Adventures of Big Bad Wolf.  Can use Nick for change of appearance, props discussion, etc. at same time.
Problem 4- structure project
Problem 5 - clips Titanic Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars Cantina, excerpt Restsurant at the End of the Universe.

I may tweak these...(I've already completely reworked my first 2 days based on this, so we will see.)

New year - new blog?

Last year was overwhelming.  Even though I had done Odyssey for a number of years, there were many things I had to learn how to do.  I started this, but never posted beyond the first week - and that changed dramatically.  However, I am hoping to change that this year.

Some changes - my goal is to have an active classroom with all students and coaches on it.  In addition, we will have a "Remind" set up with all coaches as owners.  I am hoping these will facilitate communication between students, coaches, parents, and me.

I have published my plan for the first 2 days, and I will be working on filling in weird details.