Educating the Dragon

Way a back I introduced my students to ‘Ted Hawkins’. A fictious character with an assignment for them. This time I’ve introduced my guest class to him in a slightly different guise.

This time he is a managing director of the Cocoa-Cola company looking for some fresh inspiration and talent to launch the next advertisement campaign for Sprite.

The teams were charged with a creating a 30 sec advert based on some real event, told as a ‘mini-story’ but it had to contain, what he called ‘a Sprite moment’. I used the following clip to give the students the idea of a ‘mini-story’ and used the Pepsi ad to keep the pomotions fair and equal Pepsi ad

Some initail observations of the students revealed more about my age than their lack of trivia knowledge…. “Whose Michael J Fox?” they asked. Hmmm…. How do you answer that to a bunch of students with little memory of the ’90’s let alone the ’80’s? Check out the book- it’s well worth a read.These are Y7’s and the fact that I’m standing there in a silly hat with a stupid ‘American’ accent they accepted a lot easier than I’d anticipated.They accepted the mission as given, broke up into teams and have thus far produced an origial story (draft) a storyboard (draft) and a plan for getting it completed within the 24hours I’ve given them. It’s 24 hours more like the TV series with a hour at a time with gaps in between but 24 hours ‘project time they’ve been given.By the end of the week, looking at the time table they will have completed about 13 of the given hours. It is at this stage that I hope to discuss with Chrissy whether or not the project should be completed or trashed. I hope they’ll get it finished and we can share the project with you all. But we’ll see.