Signup sheet
There should be a signup sheet at midway to collect email addresses to email about the upcoming class. Ask for name plus email, so that if their handwriting is bad you have a second chance to figure out their email, and maybe the class year to help you confirm you got it right. You can seed the paper with a few fake entries to make it look less empty. At the end of the event, make sure the list goes to someone to get the addresses added to the tech-squares-interest mailing list. When trying to decipher the addresses, in addition to regular finger, you can finger with wildcards against mitdir.mit.edu, or use this page, which is very handy when you can read part of the address.
Use modern music
I suspect that students will be more enthusiastic if they hear us dancing to modern music / music they know and like. This probably means refreshing the tips every few years.
Some possible songs:
- Jonathan Coulton song (patter?)
- Moves like Jagger (patter)
- Rolling in the Deep, by Adele (singer; Ted has done it and there's already a good recording of Paul
calling it) - Lady Gaga song (singer?)
- Dazzling Blue (singer by Guy)
- Gangnam Style?
Consider your audience
When figuring out the details of the performance, keep in mind the audience. Anybody who already knows how to square dance and enjoys it will probably show up at Tech Squares unless we massively screw up our midway presence, so we shouldn't be targeting at them. This means that easy tips are probably better than hard (we sometimes get rusty dancers to help, and mistakes are easy-ish to notice, whereas a flawless challenging dance looks much like a flawless easy dance (and the latter is much more likely)). Similarly, the audience won't know the difference between Ted and other callers, so typical Ted music or recordings of Ted is less important than having music students like or a good recording quality.
Other things that might help
- If you have multiple squares, try to balance their skill — don't load all the rusty folks and class members into one square, and the regular attendees to another, because it's likely to make the weak square collapse
- Think about how to balance the virtues of "multiple squares", "strong dancers", and "looks like MIT students"
- Email out (a link to) the tip that will be used to all students or all club members or something, so that people who feel shaky can listen to it first and figure it out