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Re: A Coding Club
In my experience, the key is to find the right combination of openness and guidance. If you give too little guidance, some/many of the students will not find the forest for the trees. Too much guidance, and it can start to resemble homework.
I think there are three topics that many people find motivating -- graphics, games, and robots. If you can rotate through these topics, I think you can keep people motivated and introduce programming and other STEM concepts quite easily.
The other thing to keep in mind is the length of challenge before there is some form of reward or feedback given. For smaller children, this needs to be every few minutes. If three year olds are stacking blocks, they want to have someone clap and smile about their accomplishment every five minutes or less. For kids in elementary school, they want someone to comment on how good their coloring book looks every ten or fifteen minutes. I'm not a psychologist, but for high school students, I'd start with projects that take an hour or less and lengthen them as people's motivation seems up to the task.
STEMy sorts of things I've done with teachers involve using a microphone and FFT function to discover what your cell phone's tones are. Once you understand the system, you can build an autodialer or send codes to one another -- for background, look up DTMF. Another one we did involved taping an accelerometer to your cell phone and having the alarm go off so that it buzzed. At what frequency does it buzz? In which axes? Are all cell phones the same?
There are quite a few similar challenges, mostly built around NXT and LEGO sensors on the TUFTs CEEO website.
For game challenges, pick a relatively simple game -- something like angry birds, but perhaps with your own theme. Maybe you have pirate ships lobbing parrots at each other, or Roman army legions flinging farm animals. These simple games can them be made multiplayer and expose networking, can be given some AI so you can play against the computer, etc.
The other day I posted one I did with my kids over the summer. It was a virtual Spirograph. Figure out the math and choose a small step size so that linear approximations make smooth curves. We added multiple pens at once, decided to show the wheels, had a button for screen shots, etc.
Greg McKaskle
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