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My latest absence... (and an explanation for the previous summer's void-ness)
Sanfam
I like clocks.
in Zocalo v2.0
Just checking in again to let the lot of you know that, as usual, I have disappeared to manage some additional real-world stuff. I am still here, but the current job (not retail!) has been absorbing most of my daytime resources with the remaining time devoted to household stuff. It's been crazy, it's been busy, and stuff is just so different today than it was a month and a half ago. This leads me back to when all of this started: Last summer. It was then that I set into motion a series of dramatic changes that have brought me out of a generally crappy employment.
In March 2010, I was given an opportunity to teach a course of my own design at a summer camp for super genius nerdlings (grades 7 and 8 according to the US school structure). This was interesting since I am generally a quiet and not terribly extroverted nerd in the real world and had no prior experience dealing with children (beyond the ages old trick of throwing something and having them bring it back). I was told that I would be managing two sets of eight kids, and that I would have complete control over what to teach them and how to do stuff for roughly six hours a day. After some thinking, I decided to settle on something related to Physical Computing: I would provide these kids with an Arduino and teach them how to make stuff with it! Brilliant! I bring this idea to the program director, she's glowing with enthusiasm and gives me the green light. Sweet! Now I just need to learn [i]how[/i] I'm supposed to do this.
Over the following months, I was tasked with designing and building this two week course to teach a group of unknowns everything about circuits, code structure, and good design habits. I had no idea what prior knowledge they might have had, so I had to make sure even a complete newbie could tackle the material. What if it's too easy? What if it's too hard? What if they just spend two weeks being miserable and it's [i]all my fault?![/i] Time passes, I start to realize that this is something well beyond anything I had ever taken on in the past. Shit just got [i]real.[/i]
To Be Continued...
In March 2010, I was given an opportunity to teach a course of my own design at a summer camp for super genius nerdlings (grades 7 and 8 according to the US school structure). This was interesting since I am generally a quiet and not terribly extroverted nerd in the real world and had no prior experience dealing with children (beyond the ages old trick of throwing something and having them bring it back). I was told that I would be managing two sets of eight kids, and that I would have complete control over what to teach them and how to do stuff for roughly six hours a day. After some thinking, I decided to settle on something related to Physical Computing: I would provide these kids with an Arduino and teach them how to make stuff with it! Brilliant! I bring this idea to the program director, she's glowing with enthusiasm and gives me the green light. Sweet! Now I just need to learn [i]how[/i] I'm supposed to do this.
Over the following months, I was tasked with designing and building this two week course to teach a group of unknowns everything about circuits, code structure, and good design habits. I had no idea what prior knowledge they might have had, so I had to make sure even a complete newbie could tackle the material. What if it's too easy? What if it's too hard? What if they just spend two weeks being miserable and it's [i]all my fault?![/i] Time passes, I start to realize that this is something well beyond anything I had ever taken on in the past. Shit just got [i]real.[/i]
To Be Continued...
Comments
Or atleast buy me a drink before.. ;)
[B]Days 1-2[/B]
I'm going to skip past the boring parts where I was dwelling on what the hell I would actually do and jump ahead and start with the first two days of the course itself. It was crazy. It was fun. It was all sorts of weird being a mentor-type to nerdlings. The vast majority of them were in the 7-8 grade range, with one being a 9th grader and one being a 6th grader. Oddly enough, this youngest one knew the most about electronics and electrical theory and had all sorts of fun ideas.
At the very basic level, everyone attending would be given one item for themselves: An [URL="http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9905"]Arduino (Flex) Starter Kit[/URL]. This kit contained the then-latest revision of the Arduino board, a handful of jumper wires, some LEDs, a button, a potentiometer, some resistors, and two fun additions: A Flex-sensor, and a finger-slide potentiometer. At the last moment, I had decided to break from a planned teaching structure and instead went all-out with an open-ended curriculum: What they would do with these was almost entirely up to them.
To foster additional ideas, I supplied the room with a treasure chest of goodies:
[LIST]
[*]Two large plastic totes filled with all sorts of toys, gadgets, half-broken doodads, and other stuff from which to strip parts and neat things.
[*]One big box of electrical goodies, all sorts of wires, resistors, LEDs, and sensors.
[*]A four-foot-tall multi-drawer organizer packed with servos, stepper motors, and miscellaneous other things with tons of neat stuff in them.
[*]One giant box of LEGO bricks and LEGO Technics components (including lots of hydraulic actuators).
[/LIST]
The kids were then shown a few videos demonstrating what both myself and others have done with this same type of stuff. With this fresh on the mind, we brainstormed. These are the ideas we came up with:
[CODE]Robots!!!!1(!)
Programming/Coding
“Anything”
“Annoyatron” (“Andy Repellent”)
using Processing as an input/output
Sending/Receiving (Infrared, wired, SHINY)
Security devices?
Alarm System (with remote!)
Catapult/”Thing Launcher” (Completely innocent and [I]totally safe![/I] [SIZE="1"]Yeah! Sure![/SIZE])
Alarm photography system (to catch who is stealing our potato chips!)
Universal remote (TV-b-gone)
Automatic Super Bubble blower
An Instructable[/CODE]
The question I posed to them was...how? The next few hours were spent attempting to look at each project and map out (in plain English) its operational workflow. That is, make a visual map of how this thing worked. What made it go? What made it stop? Did it do anything, and if so...what did it do and how? How did it do those things? We used up lots of whiteboard space.
So...how? As these are tiny nerdlets with a high level of energy and a short attention span, they needed to do something cool that we could show off with, but also show that they learned. We found a mountain of LEDs in one of the boxes, a dozen button cell batteries, and some epoxy tape. Everyone had a badge that they needed to wear at all times, so we came up with the plan to add some flair in the form of blinking and flashing LEDs. Compared to the boatload of nothing everyone else had to show, our stuff rocked and everyone else was in awe. [I]Victory.[/I]
[B]Days 3-5[/B]
Teaching anything more than basic electrical concepts to kids ended up being a rough plan, as they did not really have an attention span I was able to observe. Additionally, most of the five days was spent introducing individual programming concepts one-at-a-time. I was basically teaching the kids how to program from the ground up. It was rough! Slowly, but surely, we worked our way up from simple static code into variables, read-write, switching, functions, and more complex operations. In four days, the kids were able to write a basic function that could take a button press and make a sound, light, or other action. In fact, by Day 5, some of them were even able to do so much as address multiple inputs and outputs. They had also fallen in love with laser diodes I had found in a surplus shop. With most having broken up into small groups on their own, a decision was made to pick a goal and determine what knowledge was needed to get it done.
Project 1: Alarm, Siren, and light-bar for a radio control police car. With remote.
Project 2: Remotely triggered Catapult
Project 3: Tethered Hovercraft
Project 4: Fancy Color Sensor (A very advanced project, all things considered)
Project 5: [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlVCt2SR5Ag"]Bubblesteen[/URL]
Don't even begin to think these are simple ideas, either. Most of these were actually quite large in scope. Thankfully, a positive spirit of sharing and cooperation was abundant. If someone was particularly good at something, they were more than glad to help another team that was not.
It was on this day that they also discovered the dining hall's plastic spoon dispenser. Completely to my surprise, between the start of mid-day break and their return from lunch, the kids had somehow amassed over 100 spoons on their own accord. As I would not stand for simple theft, a rule of "Use what you take" was established. From here on out, black plastic spoons would become the primary building material.
[B]Days 5-9[/B]
To be continued...
Also, my current goings-on:
I'm employed full-time as Email/Phone Tech Support for a nameless fancy coffee company. It at first it sounds lame, but it pays well and the job is actually quite satisfying. It's also an unlimited source of free or cheap espresso :p (I've become a coffee snob by profession!)
In terms of the personal life, it's been a rough month. Out of the four cats, two became seriously sick (independent of one another) at the same time. The oldest, our 23 year old Maine Coon Dizzy, had to be put to sleep just yesterday after experiencing sudden onset renal failure. She lived a long life and had some crazy amount of experience wrapped up in a big fluffy jacket. Also, drool and the power of creepy stares. I may be posting up some photos in the near future. The other, Juniper, is only 7 or 8 but very suddenly developed a blockage and intestinal inflammation. She was treated and seemed to get better, but always seems to revert. Having neither become worse nor shown improvement, the worrying continues.
I'm employed full-time as Email/Phone Tech Support for a fancy products company. It sounds lame, but it pays well and the job is actually quite satisfying. It's also an honest 9-5, something I had been longing for.
I totally get it! But if you don't reply to my DMs about this new address of yours so I can send you a wedding invite....!
Ahem.