High Schoolers, Web Sites and Arduinos

My experiences from 3 days of teaching kids to code

These last days I had the opportunity to introduce high school kids to Arduinos, as well as HTML/CSS. The junior enterprise I’m a part of, jeKnowledge, organized a 3-day event where high school students had the chance to learn how to make their first website as well as preparing and coding simple circuits with Arduino.

We even took some breaks to get some food.

The plan was for everybody to have fun but also to make sure the students learnt more about programming and technology.

We all got along really well and were able to talk about a great deal of various things. Maybe because we’re all into the same stuff and we’re only a couple of years apart in age.

In fact, it turns out that most of them are in their senior year and have about two weeks to decide where and what they’re taking in University. However, some of them are still not sure on what they’re going to pursuit. As so, we tried our best to tell them more about the degrees we’re taking and what they should expect from the next years of their lives.

Just me defusing an arduino.

One of the most important things I learnt from teaching them HTML first and Arduino later was that it was definitely the right order. Simple things like indentation and syntax are much easier to understand with HTML than with an actual programming language and I’m sure it made the difference with how quickly they adapted to Arduino programming.

Secondly, a lot of programming languages keep coming up as the best way to introduce people to writing code. I’m not going to say Arduinos win this battle, because the syntax isn’t as straightforward as with other languages. However, for very curious and interaction-driven kids like the ones we had the change to meet, Arduinos remain the most viable option. They may come at a cost, but we got a partnership with a local electronics shop who were kind enough to provide us with things like sensors, LEDs, buttons and some other shiny stuff.

Finally, I hope we had an impact (even if very small) in these kids’ lives and that they come to love programming, science and technology as much as we do @ jeKnowledge.