The Last Day in Aspen

Wow.  What an amazing few days it’s been!  Here come 3 posts that should get you up to speed on the last three days:

On Sunday, we hung out at the Aspen Ideas Block Party, and had a whole lot of fun running our Creature Mash Vibrobot workshop with two awesome groups of kids.  We even got some gas money out of it!  

Eugene and Kathayoon kept themselves busy looking good in front of the cameras, while I hung out at the truck and chatted with different members of the community about our project.  It was an amazing time, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more scenic location for a block party. 

We’d planned to head out towards Seattle on Monday, but when we heard that NBC’s Education Nation was sponsoring a panel on arts and creativity in education, we decided to hang out just a bit longer.  Nowhere but Aspen could we ever dream of hearing heavy-hitters like Jonah Lehrer, Andrea Mitchell, Howard Gardner and Damian Woetzl chat about how to foster creativity in the classroom.  Jonah’s comment about how “grit” or persistence determines success particularly resonated with us.  Through our workshops we hope to help students find value in working through failures and not be afraid to try something new and scary.

After the panel, we gave Andrea a tour of SparkTruck, and got to meet Jonah’s wife, Sarah, and their super cute daughter, Rosie.  Since we didn’t get photographic evidence of this, we’ll leave you all to Imagine it. (get it?)