[IAEP] Shaftsbury, VT Technology Camp

[Caroline Meeks]

Thanks for hosting Nicco! I had a great time.

Let me know if any of the kids report that their stick died. I'm on a
crusade to improve stick durability and I want to know what the failure
modes in the wild are.

Thanks!
Caroline

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Nicco Eneidi <nbotticelli at gmail.com> wrote:

> Recently I just had a summer technology camp at an elementary school in
> Shaftsbury, Vermont. It was a week long camp consisting of fourteen children
> from surrounding schools (Shaftsbury, North Bennington, Bennington) in
> grades 4/5/6-into-7th. Students learned how to install and configure Ubuntu
> on their laptops early in the week along with going on a geocaching treasure
> hunting trip and learning how to solder and make contact mics and create
> experimental electronic instruments.
> The highlight of the week was when on Friday July 24th Caroline Meeks came
> up to do a workshop with the children on using SoaS. The students were given
> 2GB Patriot ruggedized usb drives to run Sugar on Nexlink rebranded Compal
> EL81 laptops (fairly new).
>
> A good chunk of the time on Sugar was on using Turtle Art which some of the
> kids were somewhat familiar with since I had shown them KTurtle last year.
> All of the children picked up Turtle Art though and really flew with it! It
> was really incredible to see so many children just completely engrossed on a
> computer operating system and it's software! I had children from a very wide
> demographic with varying interests. Some of the kids were you're typical
> techy-gamer types while most were not at all.
>
> One particular child was actually coming from a local private school and
> had been very nervous to be at this camp where she knew no one and had never
> done anything like this before in her life. She is a very shy individual,
> though highly intelligent and very advanced for her age (she can beat me in
> chess!) and is more likely to be found drawing or painting, gardening, or
> building a fairy home out in the woods. Before this camp she has never had
> much to do with computers and never had much of a reason to.
>
> Well on Friday July 24th she was really taking off with Sugar! After the
> camp had ended she immediately went home and figured out how to boot her
> parents laptop from the USB drive and spent the rest of the day playing with
> Turtle Art and making really neat designs.
>
> I want to thank the team at Sugar Labs for putting all of their time,
> effort, and energy into creating this wonderful platform for young children
> to use. It is so obvious to me that the "traditional" platforms that we
> currently use in our buildings are just completely un-child oriented and
> something needs to be changed.
>
> Thank you Caroline for coming up here and presenting this to the children
> of Southern Vermont, you have definitely made a few converts and the
> comments and things they wrote on the wiki later on were super positive
> about Sugar!
>
> -Nicco
>
> --
> Niccolo Botticelli Eneidi
>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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