Join Us for a Computer Science Education Week Special Twitch Episode
Written by Jacob Komar, *FIRSTtv *Producer, 2018 NOV 29.
Hello *FIRST *fans! Have you been following us on Twitch? As we gear up for the *FIRST *Robotics Competition season, we’ve been creating all-new content to keep teams up to date and - I hope - entertained. If you don’t have an account already, be sure to make one and follow us on Twitch to get notifications when we go live.
I’m excited to announce a very special show we’ll be airing live on Wednesday, December 5 at 12:00pm (Noon) EST. April Riddett from National Instruments (and an FTA for *FIRST *Robotics Competition) will be joined by Twitch streaming star Kitboga for a 3 hour “Let’s Build!” episode. Kitboga (having dabbled in *FIRST *himself in high-school!) is a well-loved “scam-baiter” on Twitch.
What’s a scam-baiter, you might ask? Kitboga calls up those scam “tech support” and “IRS” call centers that are determined to squeeze every penny out of your loved ones - to waste their time and expose them for the Internet to see! He also codes custom software to help in his scam-baiting process live on his channel.
That’s why we thought it would be perfect to bring him in for our special Computer Science Education Week episode. Kitboga and April will be designing, 3D printing, building and programming a “meme-o-meter” robot. The “meme-o-meter” is a (software) part of Kitboga’s channel, and helps users express themselves while Kitboga is on the phone with scammers. Next week, they’ll be designing and building a real-life version!
Be sure to follow us on Twitch, and check out one of Kitboga’s videos if you’d like to see some of his very entertaining content ahead of time. See you next Wednesday!
Who is the intended audience for this blog and show? I find it odd to promote a show (on a platform many students have to break school rules to access) during classes.
Anyone interested that can’t watch live can just watch the VOD afterwards. It’s also possible, based on how they say it’s part of a weeklong event, that this will be for a general Twitch audience, and FIRST’s channel will be on the front page for all to see.
I posted this a few days ago on some other places, but I hope Kitboga’s channel is going to be live with this too, since he brings in some good numbers of people who will be interested in seeing this.
That is a great TED talk. Cracks me up every time. Reading into the articles above it seems like he is doing the trolling for a (sort of) good cause (in case you don’t want to read the whole article, his late grandmother got scammed) and he reports scammers to the US government when he can. He also works a software engineer, so it makes sense on why he is doing this stream.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a week, but I just wanted to say that FIRST managed to put on a good stream here. There were a few moments that were a bit awkward, (Apparently people get confused when you play a video with several clips of robots while a narrator says that they aren’t robots) but it overall was enjoyable to watch. Despite the concern, viewership was high since the stream was featured on the front page of Twitch and Kit went live 30 minutes before the stream to let his viewers know about the stream, then he raided FIRST, making the stream have a constant (!) 4k viewers throughout the stream. I expected a bit of a trainwreck, but FIRST and Kitboga managed to put together a great stream for general audiences. I hope they can do more streams like this with other guests, (and it looks like they will be doing a kitbot build with DeeJayKnight soon) though I admittedly don’t know of any other big streamers that would fit with how FIRST likes to run things.
