Hello! Today, the campers worked on a variety of activities, exercising their creativity and engineering design thinking. We started with a simple imagination activity aiming to get the kids to think unconventionally and resourcefully. Essentially, they were asked to imagine themselves in a room with a ping-pong ball stuck in a hole. Given only certain materials: a ruler, a newspaper, a bottle of water, a pencil and a rubber band, they were supposed to devise ways to remove the ball from the hole. Some of the more obvious ideas, such as pouring the water into the hole, came quickly. The more innovative ideas required some careful prodding.
Afterwards, we transitioned to the Lego project. The campers were pretty lackadaisical about the activity at first. Everyone’s first reaction was to make some sort of vehicle after spotting the wheels in the legos. However, around the third round and after I displayed a lego cellphone, they started creating different objects. Marc built a laptop, after drawing one first on paper. Isaiah, Camille and Hafsa each constructed an airplane. Discussing the legos afterwards, everyone mentioned that building something with written and graphical instructions is much easier than free form. They thought the activity tedious and were unmotivated to create anything too complex.
In the afternoon, we focused on the Lego Mindstorm software. After briefly introducing them to the software, I separated them into teams and had them research different aspects of programming. Camille and Isaiah focused on displaying pictures and uploading sounds while Hafsa and Marc worked on moving the robot and loops. Marc discovered how to program the robot directly while Hafsa concentrated with the software. Camille and Isaiah ran across some difficulty displaying the picture on the robot, but otherwise worked well. At the end of about an hour, the campers displayed their programs to the class. Their research and programming was great, and I’m excited to see what else that they create.
The Youth App Lab students worked diligently for the entire day. I was very impressed with their focus and look forward to seeing their apps.
