Hi Everyone,
We recently started our 2016 round of Smartkids NY school workshops. These are workshops where we work with elementary school students to teach them both programming and physical computing through our PiSoC boards and the Scratch langauge.
Above you’ll see the new trailer for the Smartkids program this year. We’re one of several companies working hard to bring the spirit of entrepreneurship into the classroom.
This year we have a lot of changes for our program. First and foremost we have switched away from the old Scratch version on the Raspberry Pi and now are working with the more modern Scratch 2 on a fleet of Windows laptops. This has proved to be much easier for the kids to work with, and for us to set up thanks to a ton of improvements made possible with Scratch 2.
Click through our gallery below:
This has also given us ample opportunity to stress test our Python and Scratch code. After a few rounds of eager kids (60-90 in each workshop) we were able to create an environment that the kids (almost!) never crashed. It also lets us see what works and what doesn’t in terms of how to guide them, and how experiments lead into the next one. This feedback will be incorporated into our Scratch experiment guides included with our PiSoC Learning Kits.
Thanks!
Robert