GKTW Visit!

Today we went to Give Kids the World Village. We were given a tour by Kathy Aubruner, who is my main contact person for GKTW. We had breakfast and then were given a tour of the village.

We were all amazed at all the things they have there. It has its own miniature golf course with dinosaurs that spit water at you, it has its own train set with different areas you can light up, it has a clown that eats paper, an all-you-can-eat ice cream parlor, and much more!

We were shown some of the old ETC projects for GKTW as well. We saw The Big Surprise, a 4d animated movie created by ETC students that is shown in their movie theater. Some of the effects weren't working, and Evan & Brendan fixed a couple of them while we were there. Hopefully we can fix the rest of them as well.

We also went to the Castle of Miracles. Here they have an Animateering kiosk (similar to the one at the Children's Museum in Pittsburgh, it lets kids puppet 3D models), as well as a Project ER kiosk (which has children paint and then animate pictures, among other activites), and the Star Fairy project, which takes wish child's stars and helps store their pictures and location of their star on the ceiling electronically. The Project ER kiosk unfortunately was not operating, and the Star Fairy kiosk seemed to have some issues with registering the stars. Hopefully we can help fix these bugs.

We also finally got to see the current pillow machine in person. We found it to be exactly as it was explained to us: big, bright, loud, and scary. It doesn't even make much sense. How does doing the chicken dance with Elmo help make your pillow? We're hoping to make a much better job so this machine can have a nice retirement.

We then presented our five concepts to the representatives of GKTW. They seemed to like all of them, but when pressed, they were split between our Pillow Tree and Rusty's Machine concepts. They seemed to like the aesthetics of the tree and a lot of the interactions for Rusty's Machine. We're going to go back and refine these ideas, as well as try to find a way to combine the two.

We also learned that each pillow is now going to have a GKTW tag sewn onto them in a random spot, and that the child will deposit this tag at the beginning of the experience. We need to now incorporate this into our plans. It's a really novel concept and makes the child believe more that he or she created the pillow.

We hung out at Downtown Disney at night. We had a team dinner at the House of Blues. It was a nice way of relaxing after visiting GKTW and a way of talking to each other about our plan.

In general, we had a great time visiting GKTW. At the same time, we also know that now we have to do a great job. All the people down there are so nice and so willing to take time out of their schedule to help us and to help the children. Kathy is so much like a mom to us, except she keeps wanting us to eat ice cream. We don't want to let anyone down with this project.

On another note, we're actually going to be down in Florida again in under two weeks. We'll be representing the ETC at the SATE Conference, which was created by the Themed Entertainment Association. SATE stands for Story, Architecture, Technology, and Experience. This conference concludes with a trip to GKTW, which the ETC is sponsoring and we're going to help guide. We're also going to be going on a cruise the weekend before (which the ETC is also sponsoring), so this month is going to be pretty hectic!