Here are photos and videos from yesterday’s @RoboExpoNYC. I love our annual celebration of creativity, ingenuity, perseverance, engineering, coding, and robots! #MakerEd #STEAM

Thank you to Hewitt School for hosting this year’s 14th annual Robo Expo yesterday! Many thanks to Erik Nauman and Jeremy Sambuca of Hewitt School, Hope Chafiian of Spence School, Michael Tempel of Logo Foundation, Lan Heng of Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Francesca Zammarano and Javier Alvez of United Nations International School, and Jane Moore (and me) for organizing again. Our event is a celebration of robotics, engineering, programming, physical computing, creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance. It’s a low-key, kid friendly, family-friendly, and age-appropriate afternoon, and I’m fiercely proud to be a part of the founding team since our first Robo Expo in 2005. 🙂

After completing a challenge, participants get robot stickers! This year’s challenges included:

• Group dance to “Holiday Road” from the Vacation movie
• Line Following (download line following files to make your own mats)
• Table Challenge
• Get out of the Box
• Over the Wall Bucket Toss
• Color Strip Challenge

You can view our tweets at @RoboExpoNYC. Here are images and videos below:

.@EagleNewsPH interviews @Michael_Tempel of @LogoFoundation at @RoboExpoNYC!

Along with a handful of awesome educators, I’ve been a proud co-founder and co-organizer of the annual RoboExpo for over a decade. A bunch of us had been to the FIRST LEGO League competitions, and while they are amazing and important events, we yearned for something more low key and kid-friendly. At RoboExpo, students celebrate robotics and programming, share their awesome projects, and participate in a few light challenges for sticker prizes.

Here is a photo album from this year’s 11th annual event: http://robo-expo.org/photos2016/ 

Also, check out the segment below about this year’s event which was broadcast on Eagle News in the Philippines!

Some photos from the 10th annual @RoboExpoNYC!

 

Notes from Scratch Day at Packer yesterday

The Packer Collegiate Institute hosted Scratch Day yesterday. It was a low-key informal day of sessions and open spaces devoted to exploring ways to program in Scratch.

As per Scratch’s About Page:

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Thank you to Jason McDonald and Chris Kavanaugh from Packer, Michael Tempel from The Logo Foundation, and a team of generous organizers and instructors for designing such a successful event. It was fun to pop in on sessions led by people I know and admire: Steve Farnsworth from UNIS, Jaymes Dec from Marymount, Hope Chafiian from Spence, and Francesca Zammarano from UNIS.

A highlight was the UPod team from Rutgers University led by Michael Littman. In a session entitled, Towards a Scratchable Home, they shared their site http://scratchabledevices.com and showed how they are interfacing with physical appliances using BYOB (BYOB = Build Your Own Blocks and is an advanced offshoot of Scratch…)

The schedule of sessions is on the wiki’s home page:

A few photos from the event:

Movie of a Pong game with the most annoying sound effect ever:

Movie of a drum sequencer:

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