Girls Create with Technology 2014-2015
Girls participated in school year sessions followed by a week-long summer camp. Activities are described in the posts below
Camp!
During camp, the girls learned more about programming and applied what they learned by programming Minecraft on their very own Rasberry Pi. On Tuesday, the focus was on motors and electricity and the girls tried their newly acquired knowledge by flying a drone.
The camp concluded with robot building and programming. The robots are constructed using cardboard, foam, paper and other craft materials. Each robot is controlled by a Hummingbird Kit that is programmed using the Python programming language on a Rapsberry Pi. Check out the videos of the girls' final creations.
Girls 4 Science Camp
Girls Create with Technology held a camp in conjunction with Girls 4 Science. You can find out more about what happened during camp and see videos of the girls' creations here.
Pi Finch
In our last school year session, the girls used Rasberry Pi to control a Finch robot. They had fun trying to program the Finch to complete a maze and avoid orange cones set up in the Computer Science hallway.
App Inventor
As out school year sessions wind down, the focus was on event-based programming. This means that code is written to respond to user actions, such as screen presses and swipes. The girls used App Inventor to create several apps for Android devices, including a drawing app and a game where you earned points by catch moles. These apps can be run in an Android emulator on your computer or on your Android phone or tablet using the AI2 Companion App.
Web Programming
In this session, the girls each built their own website from scratch using HTML and CSS. The girls used Notepad++ to type the code for their HTML page. HTML stands for "Hyptertext Markup Language", and it is the universal language for making web pages. After they were happy with how their pages looked, they uploaded them to our webserver so that they can show off the hard work to family and friends.
Engineering Day
Our first session of 2015 was a joint meeting with Girls 4 Science. We started the day with a light breakfast and broke up into groups to learn more about various aspects of robotics, including electric motors, electric power sources, programming, 3D printing, construction techniques, wiring, and design. The groups rotated among four different activities, including a campus tour. Dr. Cindy Howard led an activity in which the girls learned how the basics of computer programming using Finches and a graphical programming language called Snap. Dr. Ray Klump led an activity in which the participants made their own electric motor using a battery, a wood screw, a rare earth magnet, and a strand of wire. He then showed them how they could create a light show with an LED, and how they could power the motor and LED with a solar cell. Dr. Dana Dominiak explained how 3D printers work and how they are revolutionizing the way we build things. The event concluded with a demonstration of a 3D-printed robotic hand Lewis Computer Science students made last year.
Drawing with Code
On 12/13/14, the girls explored two different ways to draw shapes using code. First we used the Hour of Code activity featuring characters from Frozen. Next, Dr. Ray Klump showed the girls how to use Python to draw shapes and even a house. Python is a great first programming language. You can download it for free at https://www.python.org/downloads/ for both Windows and Mac.
For more details on what we did with Python, check out Dr. Klump's blog post: An Hour of Code == An Hour of Fun.
Scratch
In our first session, the girls used Scratch to create four different games. They were introduced the three basic programming structures (sequence, conditionals and iteration). We'll continue to use these structures in other languages. The girls had a lot of fun with Scratch. I have copies of all of the girls' projects. If you are interested in getting a copy of yours, please email me.
This video demonstrates how to upload a Scratch project.