Veteran conference-goers are often connoisseurs of schwag, the free promotional items handed out at industry events. And given that most conference-going means sitting in dim windowless rooms, they know that the best schwag either gets you moving or wakes up your dulled senses with strange sounds and flashing lights.
Enter the “Sound Sandwich in a Sandwich Bag” and the SMILE BlinkyThing (pictured). As many educators know, the Sound Sandwich is a crowd-pleasing activity that has learners build a primitive harmonica made of tongue depressors, rubber bands, and snippets of drinking straws. It’s a hands-on endeavor that explores how vibration produces sound, and it blows all the age-group categories out of the water: 8-year-olds love it, but so do their parents. Where many Sound Sandwiches are made, the inevitable orchestra erupts, sounding as if a tornado hit a truckload of kazoos.
At the recent ASTC national conference in Honolulu, howtosmile.org took the activity one step further by packaging all the necessary materials for a Sandwich in individual zip-lock sandwich bags. When people stopped by the howtosmile.org table in the exhibit hall, they could either do activities right then and there, or take their Sandwich to go and assemble it later, maybe in their hotel room as they waited for room service and watched Hawaii 5-0.
The BlinkyThings may be less pedagogically sound (so to speak) than the Sound Sandwich, but they do have a hands-on component—squeeze these colorful spiky balls hanging from lanyards and they change colors. They “looked like little pineapples” says Ken Bell, SMILE Project Manager. “Or maybe sea urchins. But also quite elegant, in their own way. They were especially popular in darker environments, like at the luau. And I think they became a sought-after fashion item, in a small but influential circle.”
Recycling schwag: “I’ve always been fascinated,” notes Mr. Bell, “that high-powered executives will stand in line for some trinket that would never interest them except that it’s free. And when they get the trinket home, it’s put away in a drawer or thrown in the trash.”
Howtosmile.org doesn’t want to contribute to that cycle. We saved any unclaimed BlinkyThings for our next event, and the folks at Science Museum of Minnesota--a SMILE founding partner--are hard at work developing a hands-on activity that would make use of BlinkyThings that have stopped blinking (as they inevitably do).