Lots of questions around this brand new 4-H STREAM (Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Art, and Math) camp. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have lots of answers. For those of you wondering what coding really is, coding in today's world is a series of instructions written for computers to execute tasks. However as we will learn during this week coding is part of our everyday lives and goes back long before the days of computers.
To get the day started we did introductions and a little team building for this shy group of 4-H campers. We know by the end of the week they will all be best of friends but this week is all about communication in a varity of ways so we thought we would break the ice in fun ways.
It wasn't long before we got down to business. Some experts say the first coding goes back to the 1830's when the telegraph and Morse Code was created. Morse code was actually created from a series of patterns in newspapers and was created to send clear messages across long distances using the electric telegraph. Today our campers used Morse Code to write their names and give us some secret messages.
Next up it was time for good old fashioned binary code. Good old fashioned becuase it was actually created in the late 1600's but became the basis for our modern computers codes as recently as the 1970's and 80's. Using a series of 0s and 1s our campers made bracelets and necklaces using beads and binary codes to spell their initials. Realizeing this is a clunky for of coding it was time to move forward to something a little more updated and fun.
Coding with our mouse and robot are fairly simple, just pressing a series of buttons to get them to move through the mave our campers created. However in theory it was easy in practice a little more difficult. Things got in the way, there were environmental issues, sometimes our robots didn't go as far as we expected and we had to learn how to adapt our codes to acheive our goals.
It wasn't long before lunch and lets be honest who doesn't love a burger and tots. It gave us a chance to sit down and eat together to learn more about everyone's coding wishes. Of course it wouldn't be long before they were on teh computers and working with a new 4-H program that we thing will be a lot of fun.
Once we had the computers up our campers worked together to start learning about Python, Scratch, and other fun ways to code on computers. This is all part of the 4-H Clover curriculum which is an online partnership between National 4-H and Goggle. We were excited to introduce our day campers to this great resource and to be able to hopefully make them their own accounts where they can earn badges and explore the world of coding on their own.
Our last activity of the day was to code making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. With the help of our adult volunteer Brooke our youth found out that coding is a lot of hard work and you must be detailed oriented. Although their attempt at something they thought would be easy was an epic fail, it gave them an idea of things to look for as we move forward in teh week and that is what it is all about.
To check out all the fun from today in photos please click this link.
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