Coding Club Update…Wed 3:30-5:30 SB Library

Hello!  I wanted to let you all know that this school year we don’t have Coding Club Mondays after school at GV Jr High -the rules changed a bit, and they needed us to have a teacher sponsor, and thought lunchtime would be better -which made it difficult to get high school student volunteers, as you can imagine!  We’re working on this though.

And in the meantime, the SB Central Library was keen for us to continue, and we’ve started up again on Wednesdays but earlier – 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm. We have Matt and Caleb coming to help out. We’re also adding in some ‘challenges’ – things you can do during one session, like 10 levels of Code Combat, creating a sprite (for the new member page), using Scratch to create a pong game, creating a single level game on flowlab.io…We’ll vary it each week. The goal is to provide Code Combat to learn actual coding, but lots of other activities as doing Code Combat 2 hrs straight for 10 weeks might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

If anyone needs a ride to the library from GV Jr High – I could pick you up at the Goleta library at 2:45pm on Wednesdays… please let me know in a comment here if you’d like to do this and we’ll sort it out!   take care –  Paula

Guess what this is…

 

Summer coding ends Wed. Aug 10th, special movie and refreshments

I want to let you know about this Wednesday and also want to find out if you’d like to continue with coding club once school starts, and if so what is your preferred time and place.

THIS WEDNESDAY

Tomorrow Wednesday night, coding club is on at the Library, 5-7pm, and there is ALSO a special event I’ve organized which parents and students might like to attend together – it’s a edu-documentary looking at the future of work and school, which talks about how the nature of work is shifting due to innovation, and then looks at what kids need to learn and how school might change.  It’s worth seeing for all parents and students in or soon to start high school.

Details: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/special-screening-most-likely-to-succeed-tickets-26312812330

The movie is in the Faulkner Gallery at the Library – 6-8:30pm:
Movie, then refreshments at 7:45 pm and discussion.

I hope you’ll join us.
Of course, if you’d rather do coding club as usual, that’s fine! We’ll be doing both. 

CODING CLUB DURING SCHOOL YEAR – what’s best?

This Wednesday is the last scheduled Coding Club session for the summer!  Sniff, sniff.

But we want to continue and hope you do, too.

What time and place works best for you for coding club? 

Please complete this short survey and let us know!  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Q5B5XJ8

We are thinking we’ll have one afternoon at GVJH like last year, but also an evening at the library, assuming I can find another parent volunteer to help out one of these times.

Please give me a call or email if you have any questions or feedback – thanks so much!

Paula

Special coding session this Wed

Hi!

I hope you can come this Wednesday, July 20th to Coding Club – we’re going to use part of the time for a special session with Melch, Senior Software Engineer from Procore.. Involving Legos and a team challenge.

Most software today – mobile apps, Xbox/PS4 games, business software, etc. is developed by a team of people, because there’s NO WAY one person can do everything. So how do organizations do it?  How do people work together on a big software project and not overlap, not misunderstand one another, not write code that doesn’t work together…?

Agile is a software development framework that helps get you to 1+1=3…That’s what this Lego challenge will show you. And if you want to build software with your friends, or any group of people- it will help you do it better sooner…just sayin.’

Come along! It’s going to be fun.

DIY – Gamer Badge – try on your own

I ran across a pretty cool website for learning in a NON-schoolified way: www.diy.org

There are  Gamer, Minecraft, Scratcher, App Dev badges and MANY more that you may want to explore.

There are 10+ activities listed under each badge – you need to do 3 to achieve the badge, and 6 for ‘mastery.’  Once you complete a task like “create a Minecraft skin (easy)”, you post a photo or video of it for review. And a person reviews and approves it if you’ve achieved the task.  Might be fun to do if you have free time this summer and get tired of your go-to’s.

P.S: I would do some of these, frankly… but I’m a grown-up, too old. must find a grown up equivalent.

PPS: Imagine if this is what school was like. Would you like school more? 

Coding Club at the Library – Wednesdays

Hello, tomorrow we’ll start with coding club 5-7pm at the Santa Barbara Central Library!

1. Walk into the main floor of the library straight ahead – you’ll see laptops and a 3D printer in a glassed off room. That’s the lab.

2. They have 8 very new laptops we can use, and many more that are older…you are welcome to bring your own laptop, too, if you like!

3. There may be some new people there as they listed the club in their calendar and in the children’s library 🙂

4. It’s right around dinnertime, I know –  the lab is right next to tables on linoleum where it’s okay to eat – so feel free to bring food/a snack! 

We have a short agreement we will ask everyone to sign which has three parts, so everyone knows what you want and so you know what we expect!  There is also a library media permission form as they’d like to take photos of us in ‘action’ and promote the club on social media.

Here are the three parts if you want to think about them now. A and B are already part of our club, but we haven’t done C! I think you’ll like C…

A. We ask that you come to the coding club to:

• help yourself and others learn to code,
• have fun, make some friends
• share what you know,
• ask questions, and for help if you need it, and
• be nice and welcoming to everyone else there 

B. The only ways Coding Club would not be a fit for you would be: 

• If you don’t spend any time learning coding during sessions, and/or
• If you’re regularly disruptive – (i.e., making it difficult for Carter to share info/help/provide guidance.)

C. What you want to get out of the club is: _____________________
(for example: complete CodeCombat World 3, learn Python, see if I like coding,  make friends, build a game my friends can play, or whatever your goal is)

Let me know if you have any questions, and hope to see you there!

Paula

Visit from Melch and AJ from Procore Technologies

Thank you so much to Melch and AJ for coming along and talking about their jobs and company!

Melch and AJ introduced us to Procore Technologies (based in Carpinteria), what Procore does, and the work that they specifically do there.  Melch is a Senior Software Developer and works on the customer interface side of things (I hope I got that right!) , and AJ works in the Site Reliability team, making sure the software doesn’t have problems, and making surecustomers can get to their Procore software.

Procore Technologies provides software for construction projects, to help organize, manage all the many people that will work on building a physical structure – whether it’s a home, an office building, a bridge or road, or even a baseball stadium! You can look at some of the projects that used Procore software here: https://www.procore.com/projects/

It’s interesting to note that both Melch and AJ started learning coding on their own, and would have loved to have a club when they were in school.  Here’s a bit more about Melch and AJ.

Melch Chun

Find out more about Melch’s professional side here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/melch-chun-6bb81117.

Melch first started programming games on her TI (Texas Instruments) calculator!  She has a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and a Masters (UCSB – yay) in Optoelectronics (Electrical and Computer Engineering).  And she also managed D.A.W.G, the dog rescue shelter in Goleta for a year, and worked as a veterinarian assistant, before coming back to programming.

Melch is a champion of AGILE and Scrum for software development, which stress collaboration, communication, teamwork and developing in ‘sprints,’ aka short dev cycles. (Find out more here http://www.allaboutagile.com/what-is-agile-10-key-principles/.)

AJ Bahnken

Find out more about AJ’s professional side here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajvbahnken and about what he’s working on here: http://ajvb.me/now/

AJ has an interesting history, doing a lot of independent schoolwork in high school, which let him focus on programming/computing a lot. He also spent time at the Santa Barbara Hackerspace, and ended up getting hired for some programming work through that when he was 17!

 

What do you remember about their talk?
(Here’s two short videos too – it’s very hard to hear though!)

MELCH

AJ

Please register for Summer Coding – SB Library, Wed PM

Happy to say that the Santa Barbara Library is happy to have us use their computer lab on Wednesday evenings, for no charge! Fantastic.

Since we’re moving to a new venue and probably getting some new students joining us, and Carter and I want to be able to easily contact everyone, and have emergency contact details available, please go here to the CoderDojo listing we’ve set up for the club and register:

https://zen.coderdojo.com/dojo/us/santa-barbara-ca/california-goleta-goleta-valley-junior-high-school 

And I know some students may want to carpool – please leave a comment below if you’re interested in carpooling, OK? We’ll figure it out!

Cheers,

 

Paula

 

The Library said yes!

Hey,

The Santa Barbara Library just said yes, we can use their computer lab so we can keep going with the Coding Club over the summer!

We’re looking at Wednesday evenings, 5-7pm, at the Central Library, near State St..

Since 8th Grade graduation is Wed June 8th, we’ll start the evenings the NEXT week, Wed, June 15th.

Cheers,

P

 

RPG Maker MV

Here is a link to a free version of RPG Maker MV, the dev kit we’re going to be using for then next few weeks. It’s downloaded in 2 parts, when both are downloaded extract all files from both into a single folder and then replace all duplicate files. When that is done open the folder and launch the application.

Dropbox link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tyq9vp8du6gy91v/AADxaxbfz49bNA6CmK-Lgfa8a?dl=0