Day one – we have lift off!

Cyberneering at Wonderama 2008, Day One.

The day started earlier then last years Wonderama with the first guests arriving at 9:30.  We have had issues with our booking system and the Apple Mac.  The Apple has now been relegated to a glorified sign, while our trusty laptop is powering the booking system.  We have split the booking periods to morning and afternoon sessions, to prevent the problem of being totally booked up by 10am.  Now the afternoon sessions cannot be booked until after 12pm.  Our Steve showed great nerve in the face of many a harrassed mother and did not start taking booking until 12pm exactly. 🙂 , and we were almost fully booked by the time I left the venue at 1pm.

We had a couple of incidents with the Mixing it Up Wave Machine producing waves of tsunami proportions and flooding the floor with a slippery mix of oil and water.  The Assembly Room staff were quick to give us a helping and and a mop.  The source of the problem has been identified, and now the motor controls are obsured from little hands who can ramp up the speed far too high and far too quickly.

The Splodge (and the Magnificent Milling Machine) activity is proving to be popular again this year.  And now that we have put the correct (4mm not 6mm) tool bit on the milling machine, the candles that have been milled have identifiable letters on them.

The Design -a-Zook activity doesn’t appear to be just as popular as it was last year, although it is early days yet.  It may be because BAMZOOKi is not currently airing on BBC.  A couple of issues with this activity have been the advertised aged.  It is in the programme and signage as 6+, but ideally should be 8+… something I didn’t catch in the proofing.  We have decided to shorten the sessions as the younger kids are not able to concentrate for a full 45-60mins, so now the sessions will be 30-45mins, which will allow for extra sessions.  The PC’s we were so kindly provided by the computing staff at the last minute, aren’t quite up to the job since we need to run a monitoring program for the help files.  We are going to get some laptops to replace them in the next couple of days.

Let me see, I think Sensing with Light and Pi both ran totally smoothly! ROLAND is about the same as last year, but his backdrop is much better!

There were a number of photographers in thoughout the day. The concave mirror was used as a back drop for a number of press shots.  Too bad we didn’t have any branding on it!  Pi was the centre of photographers attention too for a while.  They seemed to like the colours.  Steve was centre shot with his orange t-shirt against the purple book in sign up, as was the book here sign on the Apple Mac!