Summer Of Code Recap Week 4: “A Shooting Star”

What I love about this experience as a facilitator is the ability to witness self confidence emerge as well as watch the “magic”. This week we had two new enthusiastic students show up to code. One of whom I spoke to earlier in the week then heard from his mother he was SO excited he made her set the alarm for 6am the day of because he couldn’t contain that joy. That is the magic of computer programming. When anyone beings to type their first few lines of code, hit render, then watch those words form images on the screen because THEY wrote it, never fails, sheer joy and excitement.

I was thrilled to also to see some of the students beginning to come in on their own time and check out the beautiful Chromebooks provided for this project. We definitely have a few future game makers in our mix and it’s showed by their desire to pursue onward. From spending time playing games or surfing the internet without much resulting back to learning a skill that will set them above the rest learned at such a young age.

We had a record number of students staying after the time allotted for the class to “just” finish up the project they were working on. Pleading to mom or dad to stay a bit longer to work on computer programming is every facilitator’s dream and here at Salmon Public Library we’re starting to realize it. Given praises from the speaker last week about how excited he was that the library here is offering this type of opportunity for kids, blew him away.

Our hope is that with the amount of students that signed up, the ones who are participating and continue to participate, maybe it takes hold on a few and offers them a new experience, a light at the end of the tunnel that they never knew previously existed.

Finally this week most of the students got through the second major creative project “Shooting Star”. And while we have new stars emerging in our class and plenty of shining stars all the time, I’d like to highlight Marci Deweese’s dedication to detail and imagination by showing off her work on this particular project. We had to be creative to think up a way to make her star trail disappear as it flew across the night sky, but with her solid foundation in the lesson’s she was learning and a little help from our vital volunteer Brett (who’s interning at Computer Zen) we were able to make it happen. Great work by all! See you again next week!