Brick by Brick visits The Barnacle in Coconut Grove

This was a great day for both BxB groups to meet - the Mater Academy kids and Girl Power group had a great time getting to know one another.

We learned about the boathouse built by Mr. Munroe in Coconut Grove. In addition to designing and building boats, he also built his house, The Barnacle, which had many ingenious ways to take advantage of breezes to cool the house in 1891. We saw many tools, handmade toys and early cameras he used to document the early days of Coconut Grove.

The view from the boathouse.
Thanks to the guides at the Barnacle for an excellent look at life more than a century ago!

Street Poets in Mater Academy

The letters are all different, we are missing an H or an extra S.
Naming. A Building, a fence, a window.
Walking and writing words.

Beatmaking and Scratching At Girl Power

Teaching in an interactive environment The Scratch Academy got everyone
creating their own beat.

Scratch Academy teaches Mater kids some DJ basics

Scratch Academy, a professional DJ school, visited to demonstrate some DJ techniques to the group. We talked about how DJ-ing relates to a lot of the work we are doing in visual and media art, because it is a marriage of hi-tech and analog, or "old school" music and sound technology. We all got to try our hands at the turntables, and we also downloaded a free software called Virtual DJ, so that we can continue to experiment with scratching, scribbling and mash-ups on our own. Click on the link to download the free software for yourself! And Scratch Academy offers a first class free when you stop by and visit their studios in the Design District.

Painting letters with a vengeance

At Mater Academy, we have amassed nearly 100 building blocks with which to construct words and messages which we will compose with Little Havana as our backdrop. We'll take it to the streets right after our DJ lesson with Scratch Academy!

Back from Spring Break...

...and our thoughts turn to paint!
As designers in training, we value the analog as much as we value the digital.
Letter cards are handmade - these will become players in a stop motion animation of poetry in the streets. So stay tuned.

Using Sketchup comes naturally

Creating buildings and plazas and all manner of visionary architectural scenarios is keeping both of our groups very busy!

Capturing the afternoon light on the models.

Working with iMovie at Girl Power

Doing the clay animation i shot 52 picture and made it into a pink noisy video. - Temra

Sindia's City in Progress

Animation exported from Sketchup.