Several weeks of debating and planning following Young Rewired
State finally came to fruition on the 16th of
October, with our first Prewired event.
Thirty eight kidsyoung people arrived between 9:30 and 10 on that
Wednesday morning (it was half term week in Scotland, so we weren't pulling
them out of school), grabbed some kindly donated Google swag, made name badges
with stickers and felt-tipped pens, and sat down for two and a half hours of
lightly guided learning.
They were between the ages of three and eighteen, although the three to six
year olds were more there to be tagging along with older siblings or
University staff. It's obviously impossible to divide attendees up by age and
decide what to work with them on, as older definitely does not mean more
experienced. We had decided on no lower bound for the age limit, and no lower
bound for experience either, figuring that the only real requirement is
enthusiasm about programming. There was a huge mix of interests and abilities,
and we let them decide for themselves which topics would be worth listening
to.
We also had about fifteen students, University staff or industry professionals
along as mentors.
After a few minutes of welcomes, where most of the room were willing to
introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to learn ("Python",
"Scratch" and "more about programming in general" were popular ones) we kicked
off with three five minute introductions: to HTML and CSS (beginner), to HTML5
Geolocation (intermediate) and to Python's Natural Language Toolkit
(advanced). They then had the chance to spend 40 minutes in a hands-on session
for whichever of these they chose. The groups were very evenly spread, and
despite a few hiccups with Python installations on Windows and Chrome not
playing nice with geolocation (worked through thanks largely to the mentors)
most people got some code up and running and appropriately hacked about with
by the end.
We took a break for juice, crisps, chocolate and fruit, plus a bit of hardware
tinkering. We'd borrowed a Nodecopter, but hadn't managed to get it charged in
time so it wasn't in the air, but there were still plenty of people interested
in looking at the code to control it. We also had a demo of a robot arm, which
could be controlled by an Android app connected to a Python server, which had
been written over the summer by one of our mentors.
Next up were three more lightning talks: introduction to Scratch (beginner),
doing cool things with Redstone Circuits in Minecraft (intermediate) and
introduction to PyGame (intermediate-advanced). The following hands-on session
for Scratch was under-attended, possibly ousted by the allure of Minecraft,
but the PyGame session had over a third of the group and made some great
progress, which was awesome.
We finished a little late, but still managed to have time for a quick demo of
a football playing robot from the nearby robotics lab, and a few attendees who
took their time dragging themselves away from their screens.
I'm told that overall it was a success. I was concerned because I was
generally called upon when something was going wrong, so my perspectively was
weighted towards the negative. But it wasn't too chaotic, none of the
kidsattendees played up, and as far as we could tell they were
doing something in some way productive at all times.
A lot of them had had little to no programming experience before that morning,
and I really hope they were able to take away something positive and, most
importantly, feel encouraged to try things out by themselves at home. Plenty,
too, had enough experience that they were calling out to correct the speakers,
and helping their peers to get things working. It's a huge challenge to find
enough activities to engage so many different levels of experience and
interest, and I don't think we did a bad job.
Our next Prewired event will be on the 30th of October, and we're running them
bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from now on. They will be henceforth less
structured. Our primary aim is to help young people to realise that with
programming (and related areas) they can create anything, express
themselves, and change the world. We don't wish to enforce a curriculum, but
encourage them to explore areas they are interested in, learn how to teach
themselves and figure out how to make what they want, and most of all to
persuade them not to be afraid to experiment - to hack - and to just keep
trying if it doesn't work first time. To get them excited before they become
jaded and before this society's stereotypes have a chance to impact on them.
You can find out more about Prewired at prewired.org,
and join the mailing list there too.
Photos and feedback
Here are some of the photos from the day:
If you took some that you'd like us to add, then please send them to
hello@prewired.org!
Similarly, send any feedback you have about the event to us that way, as well.
Resources
I'll update this post (as well as the website) with resources from the
speakers and mentors as I get hold of them.
Beginning HTML and CSS:
HTML5 Geolocation:
Building a chatbot with Python's Natural Language Toolkit:
Intro to Scratch:
Minecraft Redstone Circuits:
Intro to PyGame:
