College One: Evaluating our first workshop...

I found that within the workshop the children's enthusiasm is what made the workshop work and run smoothly, the co-operated and experimented with everything we gave them. It was nice to see students who was not in the class come and see what we was up to, I found we had a lot of visitors and some said they wanted to do it themselves. A-level students came and watched the ending (popping of the balloons) along with other students and teachers who photographed the results, this for me was encouraging to see and made me realise that maybe we did do a good job and out choice of workshop was successful.

However. there was aspects within the workshop that did not run so smoothly and could be developed and improved for the next workshop session. As we used white spirit so that the wet paints would dry quicker, we believe this to be the cause of so many balloons popping before they were meant to, we have now decided to exclude this element in our next workshop as the oil we used may be sufficient enough. I found that we had too much time planned in for filling the balloons and hanging them up as the children became fidgety and some began to lose interest in filling balloons, they became more fixed on wanting to pop them. I would factor less time for this part as the hanging device was too high for students to get involved so they lost concentration, maybe we could extend the feedback area. Another area that needs changing would be the balloon types we use and some popped before we wanted them too because the quality of the balloons was poor, the already coloured balloons worked best so I would get more of these for our next workshop.

As for myself and my roles during the day, I think I could of been more involved at the beginning with the presentation and at the end when the children were popping the balloons. Whilst the children were popping the balloons I just recorded video's whilst some of the others took more professional photographs, snap-shot videos and videos but because I have no camera experience I felt like I could not help. Overall, the workshop was successful and we all enjoyed it, Louise's feedback was encouraging for our next session.