A Coding Club

[yash101]

Originally Posted by vladtheimpaled

I wanted to create a coding club in my school but my school would never allow because they're afraid of it creating new hackers. One of the hackers just graduated last year. The last thing they want is a new one to troll IT.

You could show some of the documents at sites like collegeboard and other credible sources that show how important CS is for students.

Launching a coding club is FAR cheaper than launching an entire new class for CS. Who knows, if it works exceptionally well, it might get much more funding from the school and maybe even a CS class might be started!

[krieck]

One possibility for an icebreaker would be to play Fizz-Buzz. Go around the group counting off, but if the number is divisible by 3 say "Fizz". If it's divisible by 5 say "Buzz". If both, say "Fizz-Buzz".

I've heard this described as a child's game, but I remember it as a college drinking game. Screw up, and you take a drink.

For a programming challenge, try writing code that prints out the Fizz-Buzz sequence. This is not really difficult, but it's a couple steps up from "Hello World". Implementing it requires students to write a loop, understand conditionals, and how to take the modulus of a number. Students who finish first can help out others who are struggling.

Fizz-Buzz has been used for screening job applicants. Take a look at: http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-can...mmers-program/

[Pinkbot]

I do agree with the "Hello World" activity, it's pretty simple and fun and will get your students a quick idea of coding, see if they are going to enjoy it or not, it can be pretty fun, other than that I have another idea, we did this in the beginning of one of our classes and in a couple of minutes we were all laughing and knowing each other. Students sit in a circle with one of them, or teacher in the middle or to the side, when the one leading standing up says "Small Fish", the students sitting put both fists to their chest, when he says "Big Fish" they put the fists away from their chest, in front of them. You have a lot of flexibility with this activity and can change the words or just say one of them to trick them along with going pretty fast, and if you move your fists wrong you get eliminated from that round. I know it as nothing to do with coding but I hope it helped .

[Katie_UPS]

I'm a little confused about the age range of your group, but I highly recommend having in-house or attending a hackathon or two. Its not a "hack into the mainframe" type event, but a "hack together some sort of project" event. I'm not sure what there is for high school/middle school but its a pretty big community in college with Major League Hacks (http://mlh.io/) and a lot of college hack-a-thons encourage high schoolers to attend.

The cool thing about a hackathon is it forces you to complete a project in a short amount of time and you learn a fair amount doing them, and then if you win, at least in the college ones, there are a lot of cool prizes (items and/or cash) you can win and its good exposure to companies.

As far as activities, in the class I TA for we have labs that focus on using a specific concept: if statements, loops, state machines, arrays, pointers, etc. We use arduinos and try to make it fun (key word: try). Anything with easy access to accelerometer data that you can then drop from a large height makes for a really fun lab where the students have to use accelerometer data to tell if the item is being held, in free fall, or bouncing/landing: and then compute how long it fell (you may have to guide them through the physics/algebra of that).

[ehochstein]

Sounds like an exciting and fun idea! I wish I had the opportunity to join something like this in High School, I didn't end up learning how to really program until my first internship after my freshman year in college. I was tasked with the project of creating an interactive program that could parse through a txt file of unknown length. From there I had to convert any binary or hex to something readable and make that searchable. Overall it was a fun and exciting learning experience for me (even though it took me all summer) and I'll never forget the feeling of completing a project like that (although it will never beat the satisfaction of winning a FRC competition).

[yash101]

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

I'm a little confused about the age range of your group, but I highly recommend having in-house or attending a hackathon or two. Its not a "hack into the mainframe" type event, but a "hack together some sort of project" event. I'm not sure what there is for high school/middle school but its a pretty big community in college with Major League Hacks (http://mlh.io/) and a lot of college hack-a-thons encourage high schoolers to attend.

The cool thing about a hackathon is it forces you to complete a project in a short amount of time and you learn a fair amount doing them, and then if you win, at least in the college ones, there are a lot of cool prizes (items and/or cash) you can win and its good exposure to companies.

As far as activities, in the class I TA for we have labs that focus on using a specific concept: if statements, loops, state machines, arrays, pointers, etc. We use arduinos and try to make it fun (key word: try). Anything with easy access to accelerometer data that you can then drop from a large height makes for a really fun lab where the students have to use accelerometer data to tell if the item is being held, in free fall, or bouncing/landing: and then compute how long it fell (you may have to guide them through the physics/algebra of that).

Sounds like something that I and many others will be interested in! Sadly, currently, our funds are $0.00. All our resources are shared school computers and the GitHub student packs

It'll take a while for us to get the funds required to buy Arduinos and sensors.

I need to start approaching organizations and other sources for funding. It is my goal to make this program free of charge because no one should have to pay to learn (the opposite of real life )!

[NWChen]

Originally Posted by yash101

I need to start approaching organizations and other sources for funding.

Yash, you may want to look into hackEDU. I'm working on a similar club at my school. If you shoot an email over to Zach Latta, he may be able to help you in terms of funding and gathering resources from organizations and companies.

As far as material for a first meeting goes, I think a lot of people don't initially recognize the "wow" factor in coding. If you bring in a speaker from a tech company or show members unique things you can do with code, that might be a useful tool for engagement. For example, at one hackathon, an event organizer asked us all to visit a website; he then proceeded to conduct an orchestra (on all our individual laptops) from his phone.

[yash101]

I will be looking at HackEDU. It seems like the service I have been looking for! Thanks for the link!