I met early Wednesday morning with staff from Dean Technical High School,  in Holyoke.  This is Holyoke’s vocational high school, and they have a woodworking program that  could be a wonderful connection for the playscape project. I met Nelson Garcia, who directs the woodworking program, and we talked about collaborating with Bill Diehl from the Collaborative (The Collaborative is currently running Dean Tech, and also are the non-profit sponsor of the Bogin playscape Project).  It would be a wonderful connection to have high school students from Holyoke building equipment for pre-school kids in their own communities.  I brought a “ball stomp” for Nelson to see, describing how we are looking to start with very simple designs, inexpensive and easy to duplicate.  He feels the Dean Tech program could easily make ball stomps, and was even interested in helping come up with the design of  the”connector” piece we still need to form a “group stomp” ; so kids could use several ball stomps at the same time as a group activity.

As the project moves forward, we intend to form collaborations with more organizations that can help spread ideas and widen the impact of the project.  I look forward to working on more basic equipment designs that high school students can make for pre-school kids!