I shared this link with Kasie Stark, one of the fabulous Science teachers at The Brearley School. Kasie is leading a MakerLab session during Brearley’s Summer Start program, and she suggested trying out Paperbits with her campers this week. On Monday, Kasie and I met to chat about micro:bits and MakeCode (micro:bit’s JavaScript Blocks editor). We gathered copper tape, LED lights, alligator clips, and Piezo buzzers, and a few copies of Per-Ivar’s Paperbits lessons.
Today, I met Kasie and her campers and we explored together. The girls are both going into 4th grader and have had experiences with littleBits, LEGO WeDo, Scratch,JavaScript, and more. I love working with smart, fearless girls! We treated Per-Ivar’s Paperbits PDF’s as a fun starting point, and then the girls further prototyped with different sequences of blinking lights and different tunes from the buzzers. See images and videos below.
From June 22 – July 24, I led technology projects at Marymount’s Summer STEAM Camp in the awesome FabLab Makerspace at their 5th Avenue campus. It was quite an experience to gather, develop, and run projects for campers with varying skill sets in grades K-5 for five weeks. Also, each grade level had a different and unique theme almost every week, and I challenged myself to plan integrated projects that correlated with their themes.
Thankfully, I regularly attend lots of professional development events including meetings, workshops, and conferences. Plus, I have a pretty big network of people generously willing to share ideas, so the hardest part was to research different options for each week’s topic and narrow down the choices. Blessedly, Nancy Otero (@LeSheepo) was there for the final week of camp to help with crafting automata and laser cutting gears. She’s an amazingly gifted engineer and design thinker who also leads wonderful learning opportunities at The Beam Center (@beamcenterNYC) in Brooklyn and beyond.
IE1 and IE2 in grades K-1 were the youngest campers I worked with. They met the least frequently for one or two 45-minute sessions per week. I had a set of iPads available, so after some brief instructions and examples, kids worked independently or in pairs to explore a variety of coding, building, and learning apps including Kodable, Hopscotch, Scratch Jr., Blokify, Tinkerplay, and PrintShop.