Summer Technology Leadership Program
A 5 day program for kids ages 12-15
(Last Updated: July 2, 2014)
This summer, Code Collective ran a 5 day pilot program with 4 students at KIPP Truth Academy in Dallas, TX. This post will serve as a guide for the participants and is also available as a resource for any one else who is trying to put together a 5-day program for kids.
Volunteer Orientation Video:
Day 1: Getting pumped.
Code Collective Volunteers: Chirag Gupta, Sumner Chung, Shaunak Kashyap, Rajesh Lalan.
Introductions. Go around the table and have everyone say their name, where they’re from, and what they want to create during the program.
Explain Code Collective’s mission and goals for the STLP participants.
Define “coding”. Have a brainstorm on the whiteboard of what we think coding is.
Play video:
Setup computers. Pair up volunteers with participants.
Have kids spend 30 minutes per game reverse engineering — http://elm-lang.org/
12:30PM: have lunch together and discuss what they want to be when they grow up and where they want to go.
1pm — 2PM: Collective brainstorm for each student’s idea:
15 minutes per student: Answer: Purpose? Who? How?
Day 2: Khan Academy Hour of Code
Code Collective Volunteers: Chirag Gupta, Sumner Chung, Shaunak Kashyap, Jenn Liu.
Summarize Day 1
History Lesson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c
Programming Lesson
https://www.khanacademy.org/hour-of-code/hour-of-code-tutorial/v/anybody-can-learn-code
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/20967968/#editor
Whiteboard Session #2: Students create user flow charts and diagrams for their individual projects. Take photos of the white boards.
Day 3: Computational Thinking Exercises
Code Collective Volunteers: Chirag Gupta, Shaunak Kashyap, Carri Craver.
Summarize Day 2
view-source:http://www.kippdfw.org/ — connect the dots between HTML and the “front end” of a website.
http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
Interactive offline programming exercise. Write down instructions on big paper, collectively. Blind fold the person being programmed. Have another person read the instructions to the blindfolded person while the others observe. If the blindfolded person gets stuck, abort mission and make changes to the instructions collectively and try again with a new person blindfolded.
Debrief the exercise by asking what the blindfolded people felt, what they learned, what would have helped.
Panel discussion on careers in UX Design, Backend Programming, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Research, Data Mining, Front End Design, Graphic Design, Video Game Design, Hardware, etc.
Brainstorm a list of job titles and a list of skills on the white board and then have the volunteers take questions from the students.
Continue discussing over lunch and give students the option to work on other things or play games during the break.
Take the whiteboard sessions from Day 2 and start coding the websites in HTML/CSS. Teach students how to save/create an HTML file and open as a website locally in their browser. Have them talk through their website concept while working with volunteers.
Have the students e-mail their projects/code to the leader to make sure files stay backed up.
Take a group photo. Tweet it.
Day 4: Launch
Code Collective Volunteers: Desiree Bryant, Chirag Gupta, Raj Lalan, Shaunak Kashyap
Summarize Day 3
Have students introduce themselves and their projects.
Work with students on completing their independent projects and publish online.
Chromebook / ShiftEdit: Create a project folder in Google Drive. Open a new project in ShiftEdit and connect to GDrive as the server. Test the connection. Create an HTML file and save it. Make sure it shows up in the Google Drive. Open it in Google Drive and choose preview to get the site URL.
Lunch.
Create & practice presentations. Have students demo their websites, and walk through the HTML/CSS code of their home page. Time them.
Day 5: Demo Day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Cyberbullying_Day
Summarize Day 4
Welcome audience.
Play video:
Begin student presentations.
Hand out certificates of completion and design awards:
Most Practical, Most Creative, Best Design, Best User Experience
Take group photo.
Repeat next year.
