What are PLANKS?

Pricing

How do incursions look?

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STEM at play – Basic Engineering at its best

School STEM Incursions by Green Hat Workshop provide opportunities for students to play and experiment with forces and movement, iterative design, concepts of balance and counter-balance, shape, ratio, pattern, mapping and more. Workshops are available throughout Victoria and are characterised by authentic, creative activity which engages every student at their own level of ability and through their own interests.

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What are PLANKS?

PLANKS are dynamic building blocks designed to inspire creative minds. Identical in size and shape, and cut precisely from 100% New Zealand plantation pine, PLANKS are specifically proportioned so that,with the help of gravity and a little imagination, you can build, boats, castles, animals and robots… or even a spiralling staircase to the moon. Totally inclusive, PLANKS encourage a wonderful mix of creativity and skill, social development and imagination.

Up to 100 participants at once!

Family Mathematics evenings and multiple sessions over a school day enable Green Hat Workshop to provide whole schools with a rich and creative STEM experience.

Pricing

PLANKS

(please consult a direct quote for Nüdel Kart, PARTS and Makedo)
 *Please note we currently travel out of Victoria only for specific programs and when we're on tour. If you'd like to be included in a tour, please let us know.

 

Single Session (up to two hours)

up to 80 participants $450 inc. GST

for each additional participant $5 pp.

 

Full day of sessions

up to 240 participants  $800 inc. GST

for each additional participant $5 pp.

 

Family evening (1 hr. flat rate, no maximum numbers)

$600 / $500 if run with a daytime incursion

 

Cancellations within two weeks of the incursion date will be charged at 50% of the incursion cost.
Cancellations within 48 hours of the incursion date will be charged at 100% of the incursion cost.
Cancellations resulting from State or Federal health requirements and COVID-19 response has no charge.
*Travel levy & overnight fees may apply to locations outside metropolitan Melbourne
**Teacher professional development, collaborative school projects and parent talks quoted separately.

Inspire higher order thinking

The abundant, identically shaped PLANKS in our Workshops, encourage a natural curiosity, companionship and competition in participants, inspiring such processes as iterative structural problem solving, the development of horizontal and vertical patterning using space and angle, as well as balance and counter-balance to create representative designs and architecture.

 

The component nature of PLANKS draw students together in shared tower building, dream-house design, cocoons,  bridges and mapped representations of their school or city.

Emphasising physical, self-directed and concrete problem solving, rather than abstract, written and symbolic thinking, a Green Hat Workshop PLANKS Incursion will change the dynamics of your classroom and let you see new competencies in your students.

Be surprised by how the impermanence of blocks encourages

  • experimentation,
  • the acceptance of failure as a part of the process
  • demonstration of a Growth Mindset and positive learning dispositions, all while allowing participants to meet the challenges of iteration and the experience of The Learning Pit.

What Schools say..

The Cheshire staff were so impressed with you and your approach to our students and we would like for you to come to our school next term and potentially each term after.

 

Ainslie Lamb-McCallum
– Education Support Cheshire Specialist School
Yet again, your PLANKS workshop has been one of the most successful family nights our school has run.
We had parents, students and staff all engaged in hands on learning across many curriculum areas.
The rich language associated with STEAM was being used throughout.
Anne Ablinger
Number Intervention Teacher
F-3 Maths Leader
Holy Eucharist Primary School
Thanks again for our incursion last week the kids loved it and have all said it’s the best incursion they have ever had!!

 

Danielle Harvey
Level 4 Teacher
Antonio Park Primary School
As a middle school group (15 year olds) we have participated in Green Hat Workshop PLANKS building over the past 4 years.  Cameron catered for our more capable students and made modifications to enable our high needs students to participate. It is an activity that our group of students look forward to each year.

 

Patricia Glenane
Ballarat Specialist School
We all had a fantastic time, students were so engaged and excited by the possibilities the PLANKS provided them. It was great to see every student participating in their own way and learning from each other.
The whole process has been very straightforward and professional. Congratulations on your provision of such a great incursion.
Deb Nugent
Wooranna Primary School,
It was our largest Family Maths Night for years and the parents took construction to another level with their children.
Thank you for being so accommodating to our needs and so easy to work with.
Lalor East Primary School thanks you for coming and bringing hands on Maths and Science to us in such a fun, open way.
Heather Campbell
Lalor East Primary School
Numeracy Coordinator
I have no hesitation in recommending Green Hat Workshop and PLANKS if what you are looking for is a creative, intellectual challenge that can readily incorporate team work.
Gayle Townsend
Heatherhill Primary School

 

How do Incursions look?

The Green Hat Workshop Team of Facilitators are open to all manner of workshops for different purposes and work hard to taylor their presentations, timing and format to the needs of the participants in front of them at each event, rather than strictly keeping to a set plan.

The most valuable aspect of each workshop is the period of time where participants are engaged in free, self-directed play. During this time our Facilitators work hard to open up the potential learning in the activity through demonstration, question and prompted reflection.
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Following are the focus and design of some of the workshops we have facilitated.

  • PARENT MATHEMATICS EVENINGS – Whole Family open ended play

A series of workshops beginning after morning recess, then an hour of open structural play in the evening with parents; sometimes with a presentation introduction or conclusive reflection that outlines the value of open ended block play in Mathematical Development.

  •  STEM / STEAM & INTERPERSONAL SKILLS  -Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics
Introduction and examples of forces and movement within the activity, warm up challenges, Free build, Reflection, Clean up.
  • HASS – Humanities and Social Studies
– A full day of city and infrastructure design with a final city building workshop.
– A conclusion to a unit of work on geography and history using the PLANKS to recreate famous historical buildings and land-marks from around the world.
  • Creative Celebration

 Short intro and long build. Just for fun.. and education. Often at the end of the school year, at a school celebration, camp or special day.

Who’s behind all this?

Cam Lee

Partner, Education and Operations Manager

 

With two decades of experience in various teaching contexts including Primary School Teacher, STEM, woodwork and Mathematics Specialist,  Cam has designed Green Hat Workshop’s unique incursion pedagogy around participant engagement and the human instinct to experiment and play.

Green Hat Workshop’s team of facilitators are trained in structure building, learning outcome recognition, child development and playwork. They use a mix of direct and indirect action to scaffold and challenge workshop participants in an effort to produce optimum understandings of shape, forces, design, the employment of interpersonal skills and much more.