🧚 Mission A1: Meet the Fairies
Overview
What will happen:
Campers will design LED light-up wearable fashions to enter portals and blend in with the sparkling fairy inhabitants of Elphame.
Trainee's Mission Objectives:
Discover why the alliance was first disintegrated
The alliance between Earth and Elphame was lost due to falling out of magical contact with each other and no subsequent birthday gifts, a personal snub to the Prince to be rectified.
Appeal to Fairy Culture - Assimilate through Wearable ‘Magic’
Students will craft sparkling wearable technologies that will allow them to fit into the fairy culture through glowing LED lights, similar to fairy magic.
Materials & Classes Covered
Materials:
Mission Tech: Colored LED Light strips, Affiliated connections, boards, wiring, and batteries necessary
Prop: LED “Portal” to Elpheme (LED lined doorway to Elpheme room from HQ)
Universal Crafting Material
Non-Player Characters (NPCs):
Anywear Academy Agent
Character(s) encouraging Trainees to explore their creativity in fairy costume making AND to help ensure their LED light strip wearables are functional/can utilize coding learned in previous classes to the best of their abilities.
Courtly Fairy
There to greet and affirm trainees look like Fairy folk, and also introduces the concept of returning for party planning help.
Classes Covered:
Lights & Colors 1
Design Bodystorming
Structure
Note: The time duration represents the expected length of the role-play scene and crafting for the activity.
Please account for components such as class time, lunch & breaks in your scheduling.
Exposition (15-25 minutes)
Location: Anywear Academy HQ
An Anywear Academy Facilitator introduces the Elphame and the need for Trainees to blend in to complete their mission.
While still at HQ, Trainees prepare a costume or wearable that will allow them to blend into that world without suspicion (ex: anything that makes them more fairy-like, such as wings, pointy ears, floral outfits)
No tech — just crafting first.
This is an initial design that Trainees should feel free to iterate or replace later.
Class Note: Now is the perfect time to host the Design Bodystorming class (1 hr)
Initial Incident (15-25 minutes)
Location: Anywear Academy HQ
The NPC Anywear Facilitator tells Trainees their costumes are great, but ‘remembers’ that since fairies are sparkly/glowy, they need to sparkle too — by disguising LED strips into their costumes. [GOAL 1]
Once the costumes are prepared, Trainees also need to match the color of their wearables to the color of the gate to be able to pass through it! [GOAL 2]
Class Note: Now is the perfect time to host the Lights & Colors 1 class(1 hr)
Rising Action (5-15 minutes)
Location: Elphame Court
Meet a Courtly Fairy, and have Trainees role-play asking them about the alliance.
Let the campers direct the interaction but you can also prompt them with worldbuilding questions about their ‘unusual clothes’ or ‘fascinating magic’.
Climax (2-5 Minutes)
Location: Elphame Court
Fairy tells players about the upcoming Fairy Ball when they might present more gifts, and tell them to come back soon to help get Fairy Fruit.
Resolution Denouement (5-10 minutes)
Location: Anywear Academy HQ
Campers return to the HQ to discuss what they’ve learned with their instructor/mentor.
Now’s the time to prompt them to reflect on what they’ve learned, who they’ve met, and how they feel about their wearable design so far. ( what code does the micro:bit need to activate the wearable? Who did they meet? Questions they have)
Players should leave some documentation behind on how to open the gate and their decisions behind incorporating lights into their costumes just in case other trainees don’t go on the next mission.
Documentation can include a paste bin of applicable code, a scrapbook page, or a group white board that they can collaboratively work on.
Facilitator Notes
Note: It is critical that the mission briefing ‘explains’ how the real world classes (“Lights & Colors”, say), become representational for magic in the other dimension. So the phrase “using lights” can become “synchronize the Microbit.”
Tone and advice for success
As long as Trainees have a costume that looks a little bit like a fairy and has an LED strand that lights up, they’ve succeeded.
If they’re having difficulty, prompt their peers to help them with coding their electronics or prompt them with some ideas that will help them look more fairy-like.
Look at the Design Bodystorming material for inspiration.
Mission Success Criteria
[1] Craft wearables that include LED light strips
[2] Program LED light strip wearable to match the color at the portal
If Trainees meet [GOAL 1]
NPC Anywear Academy Facilitators tell them they will easily blend in with the sparkling fairy population of Elpheme
If Trainees need a little help with [GOAL 1]
Either NPC Anywear Academy Facilitators or their peers assist them in adding LED light strip functionality to their wearables OR campers need to be a little sneaky or crafty to talk their way through the interactions with the courtly fairy and any other Fairy NPC.
If Players meet [GOAL 2]
Players may travel through the portal (LED doorway) to Elpheme and meet the Courtly Fairy NPC when their wearables match the color of the portal
If Players need a little help with [GOAL 2]
Then, either NPC Anywear Academy Facilitators or their peers assist them in adding LED light strip color functionality to their wearables OR campers will need to help ‘guide’ those without the matching LED through the portal as a group.
Depending on group size, Mission Structure can take different formats.
For smaller groups
In situations where there are less than three staff members and the number of students is able to manageably code or craft in one group.
The events of this mission can be run sequentially with the Lights & Colors class occurring after Mission A1: Meet the Fairies in which the campers are told they need to glow with magic.
For larger groups
In situations where there are at least 3 staff members present and a large number of campers (>10).
Half of the group can be crafting their costume elements without technology while the other half is going through the Lights & Colors class.
This can mean that half of the group with their first versions of their costumes can go on an initial visit to the fairy world, learn that they need to incorporate LEDs into the costumes, and come back together with the other campers to share knowledge with each other providing peer mentorship opportunities.