For our first session, we wanted to have the kids create something to get them excited about the endless possibilities the knowledge of coding offers. We gave the kids basic examples of html pages and different tags to use to style content, gave them a brief crash course in CSS to change colors and fonts, and encouraged them to make websites about themselves or things they liked.
When planning for our session, we were unsure of the kind of laptops the kids would be bringing, and how permitting the parents would be with allowing them to download software. So we found a chrome extension IDE that syncd with DropBox, which would allow the kids not only to build their site easily, but host it as well.
This solution didn’t go exactly according to plan, we ran into all sorts of permission issues and problems differed from PC to Mac. However this ended up being a great teaching tool; Mentors were able to show the kids debugging techniques, and once a solution presented itself the kids were quick to implement it and apply it to other situations, and even helped other kids who hadn’t progressed as quickly to figure it out. This was the exact mentality CoderDojoKC was hoping to inspire – not only a love of technology, but effectiveness in problem solving, and collaborating to help reach a common goal.
At the end of the session we invited the parents to come watch a presentation where all the kids were able to go up on stage and show off their website. One created a great tribute to Pokemon, another detailed her favorite dog breeds, and to the mentor’s delight, another embedded What Does the Fox Say? into his homepage.
C犀利士
heck out the photos from this session on our facebook page!
Session Details:
- Saturday, October 5th, 9am-12pm
- @ Google Fiber Space
- 26 kids
- 9 mentors
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