... superimposing Biggie and Aaliyah and 'Pac onto some clouds or something...

[alexr_rwx]

- Man, camp is so awesome :) Sometimes, our children is learning, and that's great. Also: I saw a sign (and it opened up my mind) for Teach For America this morning. Nobody knows...

- Check out what the kids made: (more being posted, yo!)
http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/icecamp/185

Comments

[lindseykuper]

How cool! I had some great times teaching at nerd camp, too.

[zip4096.livejournal.com]

Man that is *so* cool!

What exactly are you using to do this? I saw someone mention a Java wrapper or something...

Alex, I would say that you're doing a great job :) When we went to computer camp, we didn't get too many real tangible results, you know? I don't recall writing anything that was particularly remarkable, but these image things look so immdiately gratifying.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*nods*

It's called JES (and it's a little IDE for jython with interfaces to java libraries for futzing with images and sounds and stuff): http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-plan/94

It's a totally different sort of approach from the camp we went to... ACE assumed that we already had this intuitive understanding of why we'd want to write code, I think. There was a lot more... theoretical understanding going on at ACE, I think -- everybody knew what it meant to have a variable (and the idea that given enough time, you could code up whatever you want), and most of the kids had some programming experience beforehand, yes? A lot of the kids at Camp ICE had only a really shaky understanding of what was going on -- but they knew that it was kinda cool to put Notorious BIG on a collage. In that we got them to make something interesting with computers, it's successful, but I don't think it's super-helpful for transferring the knowledge to other programming... they don't know what's going on, so outside of "I'm going to do this to every pixel..." it probably doesn't help. But maybe some of them have a vague idea of what programming is, and maybe some of them will come back or study CS later :)

Thankfully: our freshman non-CS kids are getting a longer version of the same course. Rock on :-\

[agonistes]

...there's a reason I think you'd make a good kindergarten teacher, you know.

[rusty42.livejournal.com]

if you want to see some real hackers ball out, come on up to CCB 311 today. we'll be kicking it old school again against the godless fascists of germany, italy, and california.