LTH Improve Our Club!

LTH is working with Boys & Girls Clubs of Columbus (BGCC) to innovative positive youth development programming for 4th-8th graders.

Improve Our Club! is an after-school workshop series that challenges students at the BGCC South Side location to use emerging technologies and design thinking to address big problems facing their club and their community.

Over the course of 6 weeks, youth participating in Improve Our Club! will get their hands dirty while the problem-seek, story-tell, prototype and test their ideas using 3D printing, Virtual Reality and more!

Improve Our Club! builds upon previous iterations of the program in 2019 with high school students at Franklinton Preparatory Academy and military veterans at the Columbus Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic.

See below for additional Improve Our Club! program details, including how to be involved. Check back soon for updates!

Program Location

The South Side BGCC lives within the Reeb Avenue Center on the south side of Columbus. You can get to the Reeb Avenue Center several ways:

By COTA Bus
- from North - take the #8 South to the Innis Ave stop, walk a block South on Parsons Ave, to Reeb Ave, then three blocks West on Reeb.
- from South - take the #8 North to the Innis Ave stop, walk a block South on Parsons Ave, to Reeb Ave, then three blocks West on Reeb.
By Car - street parking is free, usually available on Reeb Ave. within a block

Improve Our Club! Technologies

From cardboard and duct tape to 3D printing, BGCC youth will take a hands-on approach to problem-solving!

Check out some of the tech we will be using!

3D Printing

2x Lulzbot TAZ (Columbus VA)

2x Lulzbot Mini

Lots of filament (sponsored by IC3D)

Image credit: Lulzbot

3D Scanning

1x mobile 3D scanner by Knockout 3D

Virtual Reality

1x Oculus Rift VR station with headset, motion trackers, controllers

Gravity Sketch, Medium

Image credit: Dezeen

Micro-Electronics

An entire workstation provided by Capital University

Arduino, Microbits and Raspberry Pi

Lo-fi Prototyping

Cardboard, duct tape, clay, scissors, pipe-cleaners... anything to make a quick, low-fidelity prototype!

3D Modeling

4x Macbook Air workstations with TinkerCAD and Autodesk Fusion 360 (sponsored by Aspen Capital Company)

Photo/Video

2x iPad Mini photography and videography units (sponsored by g2o)

Coding

4x Macbook Air workstations with micro-electronics coding support

2x iPad Mini with Scratch and Swift Playgrounds

Program Documents

Below, you will find two living documents. The first is a program guide for Improve Our Club!, with a weekly overview as well as week-by-week facilitators' guide. The second is a collection of weekly take-home handouts for Improve Our Club! to compliment weekly activities. These were last updated in 2020.