New article on The Lab

Check out the profile on The Lab on page 14 of this magazine called Made You Look, put out by the NSW Government disability program Don't Dis My Ability. You can download it here (large download: 4.9mb)

http://www.dontdismyability.com.au/news/made_you_look

Ideas from parents

A few ideas for The Lab were flagged by parents in yesterday's session. These are:

- for the mentors/tutors to put up a pic of themselves on the website next to their name, so that participants will remember them and their names

- for there to be a version of a group photo at The Lab with faces and names of participants, for similar reasons as above

- There is renewed interest in the Arduino kits, so looking at an Arduino show and tell in next week's session

- for participants to be slowly introduced to a range of different games, to avoid the Team Fortress 2 obsession gripping a couple of the guys

Lastly, a note that the sign-in book is now in operation and is working well. All parents signed participants in and out, which has really reduced the scope for not knowing where a participant is.

Adventures with Aspergers blog

Some folks might be interested in this new blog: http://kavehadel.com/blog/2011/10/adventures-with-aspergers-cartoon-look-outside/

It's a cartoon blog by an Iranian artist who aims to shed light on AS.

Minecraft conference in the US

Minecraft is taking off in a big way it seems. Check out this conference in the US in November (thanks Greg W): http://minecon.mojang.com/

Article on The Lab in The Spectrum

Here's the article that has appeared in the current edition of the Autism Victoria magazine The Spectrum - thanks a heap to Darcy, Darcy, Paul and Lily for taking part.

Images from The Lab holiday session - first at the new venue for our usual group

The Lab Holiday Sessions - September 2011

Today we held another holiday session with around 17 particpants(a full house).

A couple of older kids left as one in particular wasn't interested, but everybody else seemed to have a good time. At one stage 11 of the kids were on a shared minecraft server, so that was the hit of the day. It was very interesting meeting some of the young people and talking about their interests.

An overview of the room, with the IP address for the minecraft server as well as a message (NO COMPLAINTS, Expect Destruction) which was prompted by some issues in prior sessions.

An angry bird playing minecraft.



An overview of the room, which is on the 16th floor with great views of Melbourne.


This young man wasn't interested in games, just design, and tried zbrush, coming up with some incredible designs by himself, as our 3d designer wasn't there today. This is perhaps an example of what simply giving kids access can achieve - he taught himself a lot through trial and error, not really wishing to do tutorials.


Some of his creations - he ended up making videos of his creations which I unfortunately left behind but hope to recover shortly;

Current activities at The Lab

With everything else happening, it's been a while since I posted an update on what is actually going on in The Lab.

Tomorrow (Wednesday September 28th) we will hold a holiday session with 17 participants at Victoria University on Flinders St. These are more casual sessions intended to reach an audience we can't cater for at the moment.

The weekly sessions continue to run well. A couple of weeks ago we had the judgement of our games competition, there were two winners, and more great entries. I will post them over the coming week or two.

We have now had one young man stop coming, unfortunately I think he was a little more advanced in terms of his skills than most of our group, so he didn't feel he was amongst peers or connect with people. Perhaps this is an issue we can address in the future if we deal with more people or larger groups.

On the positive side, our move means we can now invite back a young man who had a negative experience the first time he visited our previous location and was unable to return. He will be attending the holiday sessions and then most probably some kind of one on one sessions during the week.

Our new home in Maidstone

After Stefan did a mail-out asking for assistance with finding a new venue, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by John Roberts from Just Better Care, a carer agency. He was kind enough to show us through some offices near his own which were formerly occupied by Fletcher Jones, Eastcoast, and Pelaco. He also offered the use of their board room for the parents when they come in.

As well as the agency, the building houses the Vostro Institute, which provides training to industry.

Both of these businesses are very closely aligned with our own. In addition to this, the rent was reasonable, so we spoke with the building manager and organised to rent a space.

View Larger Map

For the past week we have been renovating the space and moving our now quite considerable inventory from Footscray. We were fortunate enough to get some incredible next day service from Pierre at ET Telecom - he helped us with a situation our new provider TPG was going to take weeks to resolve.

We will finish cleaning up the new place tomorrow, ready for our first Lab session on Thursday. I will post some photos of what we have done then.

Here are some photos from before we moved in;

The board room which parent can use;

The entry to the space.


The space.

Farewell Footscray

So, we are leaving Footscray.

In a way I am happy, in another I am quite sad.

The picture above is sticker art found outside our office of two(arguably the greatest two) Footscray icons. The guy the left can be found around our former office at any time from 5am-5pm asking for change(any one of our workers would have been asked many times), and the lady at the atms is a regular fixture. It's sad that after the closure of Forges, this is what Footscray(cbd) is identified with - drugs, and the homeless. It's even sadder when you look at some of the historical photos - you can't help but feel like it's gone backwards over the past 80 or so years. The not so glorious office we have been in used to be a beautiful theatre in the 1930s.

It is an amazing place with some incredible people and so much potential, but it all just seems to be going to waste. I am not sure what the approach of the current governments are but it seems like they want to run it so far into the ground that it is buried and can be reborn. In the meantime there is a tragic amount of human waste.

I hope to return one day.