4-H Snowflake Celebration

 

It's that time of year folks.  Time to recognize our youth and volunteers for a years worth of hard work and maybe some fun along the way.  As Jade and I sit here tabulating up what you have done I think you will be amazed at the impact you have made in the community.  

  That being said...we will release the awards segment of our program the evening of Friday, December 13 across our social media channels and right here on the blog.  Based on your feedback we will have an open house celebration on Saturday, December 14 from 10 until 2 at our office.  There will be a tree to trim, games, crafts, community service project (donating gently used and new books), hot chocolate bar, edible snowman construction boxes, and a snowball fight area.  All family friendly and a great time for folks to pick up their awards and gifts.  Drop in whenever you can and please make sure to register (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1076634626149?aff=oddtdtcreator) so that we can prepare enough for everyone (afterall we don't want to run short of snow balls...even though we are planning to let our youth make snow at the event).

  Just like a snowflake, our 4-H members and volunteers are one of a kind.  We can't wait to recognize everyone and have a celebration for you that will be like no other.  Come out and have a ball, a snowball that is.   

Animals and Gravity

   

It's that week of Summer Fun....It's Biotech Day Camp!  For those not familiar with this very populr camp we do all things science while travelling in a 15 passenger van.  Ever since the beginning we have partnered with Hoke Couty on this scientific travelling scientific adventure and this year was no different. 

Our first stop after picking up our counterparts in Raeford was Aloha Zoo.  This is a small zoo with a variety of animals and offers a safari ride so campers could actually feed the animals as they learned about wildebeests, Ostriches, Emus, and so many more.  Not only were they able to see up close and personal with animals they are not used to seeing, they learned interesting facts about these animals and how they are cared for.  One of their favorite animals was the ring tailed lemurs.  Which will go well with our field trip tomorrow (stay tuned).  All in all we worked up an appetitie at the zoo so it was time to hit the next stop....lunch.

   Lunch was at CiCi's Pizza.  I don't know many children who don't like pizza.  There they can get any pizza they like and as much of it as they need to fill and fuel their growing bodies.  All of this was necessary to give them time to cool down and fuel up for our next stop which was out of this world.

We arrived at Surge around two and got everyone checked in, armbanded, and jump socks on.  Then they literally jumped in.  They played trampoline dodge ball, tag, basketball, jumped into the ninjaw pit and used the high dive to flip into the foam pits.  Some of our campers found the foam pits so comfortable that they just swam around in them like a swimming pool.  Others took a moment to climb the rubic's cube walls or even the regular climbing walls.  All in all I would say they had a good time learning about gravity and it's importance while trying to fly through the air with maybe not the greatest of ease...but as close as you can get with a gravatational pull around you.

To see all of our adventures from today please click this link.  Stay tuned for tomorrow as we go to some unexplored new places. 

The Strategy of Coding

   Our campers have figured out that we like field trips.  We like them because they can meet the experts, and do things with real world applications.  That makes a bigger impression and ah-ha moments for them.  Today we are doing something new and different, which makes sense since this camp is something new and different.   

We travelled to Robeson Community College (RCC) today to meet Mr. William Stubbs who is in charge of the Gaming and Simulator program.  Our youth learned some cool applications to coding and that when they are in high school they can take classes to learn more and create some practical applications.  They also learned more about the design, animation, and production of these types of applications.  The highlight of the trip, besides learning about careers in coding, was having the chance to play a video game developed by one of the students.  Our youth were again inspired by our host to pursue and education in technology, and they were all excited about the possibilities.

After leaving RCC our youth travelled to Golden Corral for lunch.  They needed full stomachs to head up to Fayetteville to Just Claying Around.  Just Claying Around is a business that allows folks to paint pottery and ceramics and will fire it.  So you might be asking yourself what this has to do with coding?  That is an excellent question.  One of the things we have been trying to get across to our day campers is that coding is about patterns, textures, and variables such as colors.  What better way to show that then to create your own textures, patterns, and variables with a piece of art.  Each one of our youth created something special but also had to have some faith in following their instructions or the code that was given to them.  You see often paint colors don't look right until after tehy are fired so they needed to paint three coasts of something that may not have looked right but by the end of the firing process will be what they were planning in their heads...just like coding.

Special thank yous today to William Stubbs with RCC and Just Claying Around for allowing us to visit and have an unforgetable experience.

To see all the photos from today please click this link.

Coding...What can it do for you?

   

Today our 4-H Coding Day Campers ventured out into the world to see what the future might hold for some cool coding kids.     

Our first stop what to see John Allen and his robotics team at Robeson Community College-Early College program.  Our youth learned about engineering, planning, and coding when it comes to robotics.  Their favorite part was working with the students.  They said the students were so nice, patient with them, and helped them learn so much. 

Then it was time to see the main attraction.  The competition robot that they team built and takes to competitions and educational events to allow people to learn more about robotics.  Our youth got to see how it was put together and how it works.  But their favorite part was either handling the controls or trying to catch the rings that the robot shoots out around their necks.  The robot was much bigger and heavier than our youth anticipated and the code for it was a little foreign to them but that won't stop them from giving it a shot in the future.  

After lunch our youth dove into an activity that we often refer to in 4-H as junk drawer robotics.  Its where you take everything you have in teh junk drawer and use it to create your own robot. Our youth were creative and came up with some pretty cool designs.   

Once they finished that they got the chance to explore with some nanobots and had a ball with that.  All and all our youth were excited about the future of robotics, coding, and even said that they want to go to early college to be part of that program.  We can't thank John Allen and all his students for rolling out the red carpet and robot for our 4-H members.

After RCC it was time to go to the moon and back.  Ken Brandt at the planetarium welcomed our campers to talk about another engineering and coding marvel, the mars rover.  The youth took part in a planetarium show about Mars and learned all sorts of cool stuff about how we are exploring the planet and gathering data.  Our youth also got the chance to check out the science center and had a great time doing stem things.  Stuff and things is what they said they wanted to explore and I would ay that we are here,  Special thankks to Mr. Brandt for hosting us at the planetarium.

To see all the fun from today in pictures please click this link.

Coding? Coding Camp? Coding in 4-H?

   

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.