Ready, Set, Code — Session III

My last official event of summer! Phew! I had a really small turnout but that was fine with me. Easy peasy.

Since I had some younger ones who hadn’t attended a previous event, I read a book explaining what coding and programming are. Then we reviewed the definition of crowdsourcing:

These signs were created on postermywall.com.

Then we did our crowdsourcing activity. I showed them a jar full of gumdrops. We talked about how long it would take to count all the gumdrops ourselves. But if everyone took a handful and we added up the small amounts everyone got, it was really fast and easy. I got the basic idea for this activity here.

Our second lesson was persistence. We reviewed our definition:

And then we talked about how some things are hard for us to learn. (My example was learning to ride a bike.) I also told them to think about babies learning to walk and talk and how it’s hard for them but they’re persistent because it’s important to learn how to communicate and how to move. Every time we fail, we learn. If we fall off of our bike, we learn to work on our balance. If we’re filling a balloon and it pops, we learn to use less air.

Then we did our persistence activity:

I found this activity here.

I provided the kids with the gumdrops we’d counted, toothpicks, popsicle sticks, masking tape, and paper. I showed them the cup their foundation had to be taller than and they got to work. In the end only one kid was able to hold up the book I’d brought but they all took their supplies home and I told them to keep working on it with a book from home.

We were going to play with a programmable mouse after we finished our foundations but there weren’t many kids there and we’d started a little late waiting for stragglers to show up so I cut that part out. I think this is a huge vacation week for our area so that didn’t help with attendance.

I’m glad our summer programs are over and we’re starting to focus on the fall! I’m also glad the eclipse is over. We had about 500 people watching in the field behind the library!!!