A Coding Club

[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 )!