Summer reading did a number on my budget--who would have thought 60 teens would show up for the Disney Movie Marathon? That's a lot of not-budgeted-for pizza! So this fall has been necessarily slooooooow program-wise. Which is how it usually is-the teens need time to get back into the routine of school.
Mostly I've just been doing my regular programs: Pizza and Paperbacks book club, Teen Advisory Council meetings, Dungeons and Dragons nights, Trivia Nights, Anime Club, and a couple of movies. I only had one REALLY exciting program, and that was ROBOT DAY.
oh photo, how I wish I could rotate you within blogger.
A long-time library teen who still hangs out sometimes but has mostly outgrown teen programs approached me about robot day. She's a member of an award winning robotics team that draws teens from a number of local school districts, and they were interested in doing an outreach program at my library. I said YES! before she managed to get the phrase "Can I bring my giant robots to the library?" out of her mouth.
The teens involved in the robotics team were EXCEPTIONAL. They were extremely polite, organized, and enthusiastic. They planned everything--including creating coloring sheets for the little kids who attended. It was a big program--in one of our meeting rooms we had a ton of small robots that the kids and teens who came to Robot Day could drive and play around with.
In our auditorium, we had two of their BIG competition robots, as well as several stations demonstrating how they robots are coded, a few 3-D printers, and a station where kids could rivet a piece of metal.
It was a drop in program, they were in the library for about 4 hours and people could show up whenever and stay however long they wanted. I didn't require any registration. We had an AMAZING turnout of about 300 people! It was mostly parents and kids, but we had some teens as well--and it was totally run by the teens from The Thunderchickens (best robotics team name ever!) If you have a local robotics team, I highly recommend contacting them!
They gave me a Thunderchickens shirt!!!
